June M. Gardner

June McManus Gardner was born July 3, 1935 in Columbia, South Carolina. The oldest of five children of Lydia Fitts and Bill McManus, June was the only daughter. She was like a mother to her youger brothers and learned to develop a love for young children.

June grew in the Colonial Heights Community where she was able to walk to the Colonial Heights Baptist Church and attend all of their services. She met Norman, her husband to be, at church and in 1954 at the age of nineteen she married Norman Russ Gardner, a minister.

After graduating from college they moved to Fort Worth Texas for Norman to attend Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. June's dream was fulfilled when she was able to quit working as a secretary and attend school with her husband. While at seminary they became parents of a their first child "Rusty." They both graduated in 1962 with June receiving a Bachelor of Religious Education. Ten years later a second son, Larry, was born.

For over sixty years their ministry has led them to serve in ten churches and five states. During that time she worked with preschoolers at church. In time she began writing articles and preschool curriculum materials for teachers of preschoolers for LifeWay of the Southern Baptist Convention. She also led many conferences for teachers of preschoolers at the local, state, and convention level.

In recent years June's interest in genealogy led her to set a goal of writing a family history book about each of their eight family lines as a legacy for sons and grandchildren. Her first book about her grandmother's Harley family, "From Harleyville to Beulah Land," was published in 2012. The second book, "The Sojourners" about her husband's Russ family was published in 2013. The third book "Close to Home,", published in 2014, is a history of her husband's maternal grandparents, the Wingo and Coggins families and the allied families of Berry, Ervin, Wood and Seay. The books are indexed and are interesting reads containing history, stories and pictures of bygone years.

The remaining three more books in the series entitled "The Faith of Our Fathers" have now been published. They are:

-- "Pop and the Gardners of Clarendon County" published in 2015 is the story of her husband's Gardner family. It begins by telling of his father, Greer Lee Gardner, running away from home at the age of sixteen and joining the army. After spending eight years in Hawaii serving in the Cavalry he was dishonorably discharged as a result of a motorcycle accident in which four people were killed. He was engaged to the governor's daughter but left her standing at the altar when he heard the ship's whistle blow indicating it would be his last opportunity to return home. He ran and barely caught the ship back to the states.

In later years he worked as a blacksmith for the railroad. He was transferred to Columbia when his son, Norman, was a junior in high school. Three years later Norman married June McManus who gave Greer the nickname of "Pop."

The final two books are about June's family. Book Four, "Our Low Country Families," was published in 2016. It is about her grandfather, Robert Raymond "Ray" Fitts and his parents.

Ray grew up in the town of Brunson in Hampton County, South Carolina, the youngest son, in a blended family. His mother, Janette Amerine "Nettie" Reid was born on Daufuskie Island in the Beaufort District five months after her father, John Edward Harden Reid, died. Her mother, Deborah Nix, moved to the mainland with her six children and lived with her widowed mother, Jane McKissick Nix in the Prince Williams Parish.

Nettie was teaching in a one-room school in the town of Gifford when she met Robert J. Fitts, a local farmer. They married and had three children when he died at the age of twenty nine. His younger brother, John Edwin "Dee" helped Nettie with the farming and caring for his nephew and two nieces. In time Dee and Nettie married and three more children were born into the family. Pictures and stories are included about their six children and the places they lived.

The Fitts family in "Our Low Country Families" begins in the Allendale area of the Low Country before the American Revolution. They settled in the area of of the 258-year-old Beech Branch Baptist Church on the Coosawhatchie River. Church records attest to the fidelity of Fitts family to the church since its inception. Beside the Reids, also included is the histories of the connected maternal ancestors families of Forrester, Reeves, Peebles, Peeples, and Nix.

The final family history book in the series, Book Six, is "Edgefield Connections"--the the story of the author's father, Willie McManus, who grew up in the historical town of Edgefield. His parents, John Trapp McManus and Mamie Virginia Griffis, lived on adjacent farms in the Sleepy Creek area of northern Edgefield County.

It was discovered the land they grew up on was originally granted by the King of England to the Palatines from Germany in 1764 to settle the backwoods area and provide a barrier from the Indians. In time, the land was inherited by the descendants of the Palatines who had married into the McManus and Griffis families. Four of the Palatines are direct ancestors of the author. Including the maternal sides of the families, "Edgefield Connections" includes the stories of nine connected Edgefield families of June McManus Gardner.

Now that the series is complete, June felt one more book was needed to introduce the six books in the series with South Carolina families. Therefore, an additional book "The Faith of our Fathers" has been published in 2018. It gives the history of the religions in Germany, England, and France after the Reformation and traces the churches of their ancestors to the present day with most now being a part of Baptist and Methodist churches in the South.

This introductory book includes the histories and pictures of thirty-nine churches of our ancestors and the biographies of twenty whose Christian life was demonstrated in the series. "The Faith of Our Fathers" also includes the 263 surnames gleaned from indexes of the six books. An expanded biography of the life of the author is also included in this introductory book.