Family History
The Fulghum, Eggers, and Allied Families
A research archive tracing two American families from colonial Virginia and immigrant St. Louis to the present day.
The Short Version
How these families fit together
This is the story of Jordan Fulghum’s family on both sides: the Fulghums of Kansas and Missouri, and the Eggers family of St. Louis. The two lines converged when Gary Fulghum married Teresa Eggers in the 1970s. But neither surname tells the whole story, and the deeper you go, the stranger and more tangled it gets.
The Fulghum name itself is borrowed. Gary’s father Gale was not born a Fulghum, or even an Orrill. His original birth certificate, sealed in an envelope marked “do not open until my death,” recorded him as “Infant Lloyd” at General Hospital in Kansas City. His biological mother was Clara Francis Loyd, a 19-year-old clerk who married Earl Mead Cowden 39 days later and had seven more children in Colorado. Gale was raised by Clinton “Jack” Orrill and Sybil Holt as their own child. When Clinton was killed at 25 in a refinery explosion, Sybil later married Fred Forest Fulghum, a World War I veteran, who gave Gale his third surname. For decades the Orrill name was lost, misspelled in a memoir as “Orille.” The envelope was opened after Gale’s death in 2007, but the birth certificate inside was not researched until 2026.
Gale married Doris Vaughan, whose family had been in Jackson County, Missouri since the 1830s. Her Vaughan ancestors came from Mecklenburg County, Virginia; her great-grandfather Joseph Gibson Vaughan rode with Quantrill’s guerrillas in the Civil War. Further back, the family connects to multiple Revolutionary War patriots: Jesse Kirby of Henry County, Virginia; Bailey Anderson, who served as a spy and scout in South Carolina; and Drury Holt Sr., who fought in both the Revolution and the War of 1812. The Holt line reaches all the way to Jamestown: Randolph Holt I arrived in Virginia around 1620 as a thirteen year old indentured servant.
The Eggers side is rooted in St. Louis. Walter J. Eggers III married Jacqueline Britt, whose father Ira Mollett Giles worked for the Missouri Pacific Railroad. Ira’s grandmother, Sarah Spooner, emigrated from England in the 1850s, married twice, raised eight children, and lies in an unmarked grave at Gatewood Gardens Cemetery. Walter’s parents were children of German immigrants from Hanover and Westphalia who came to Missouri in the 1850s and 1860s.
Across both sides, the pattern is the same: people left somewhere (England, Scotland, Germany, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee) and built new lives in Missouri and Kansas. Some of their names survive in courthouse records and cemetery stones. Others are known only from a single line on a census page, or a name penciled on the back of a photograph. This archive is an attempt to gather all of it into one place.
About This Project
What this is and how it was built
This is a family history research archive. Every claim is sourced: birth certificates, death records, census pages, cemetery transcriptions, newspaper clippings, and published county histories. Where records conflict, both versions are noted. Where evidence is thin, the text says so.
The research is ongoing. Some lines go back four hundred years; others dead-end at a single name. Open questions are tracked, negative results are logged, and every search is recorded so work is never repeated. The archive currently documents over 120 named individuals across more than a dozen family lines.
Begin Here
Start with these four paths
From the Research
Stories, coincidences, and discoveries
Rev. James Anderson, born November 17, 1678 in Scotland. A Presbyterian minister who emigrated to Donegal, Pennsylvania, where he died in 1740. He is 10 generations back from Doris Vaughan Fulghum.
Revolutionary War soldier Jesse Kirby married Sophia Choice, daughter of Tully Choice Sr. of Henry County, Virginia, on March 18, 1778. A DAR application claimed Sophia was born in Scotland, but her father’s will (1777) names her as a Virginia-born child. Jesse enlisted in the Virginia militia in 1780 and lived to 95. See the Kirby line
Bailey Anderson (1754, Stafford County, Virginia) served in the Revolution as a Private, Indian Scout, Indian Spy, and was taken prisoner. He fought at the 96th District of South Carolina and in Virginia, and died in 1840 in Harrison County, Texas. Read his story
Joseph Gibson Vaughan was “one of the first eight men to join Quantrell” in 1861, and one of the last eight to die. He fought alongside Frank James and Cole Younger across 19 engagements, including the Lawrence Massacre. His guerrilla alias was “Dan Vaughn.”
On March 13, 1926, Clinton “Jack” Orrill was killed at age 25 when a tar still exploded at the Standard Oil refinery in Sugar Creek, Missouri. His widow Sybil, left with three-year-old Gale, sent him to live with her uncle and aunt on a Kansas farm. She later married Fred Fulghum, who gave Gale a new surname.
Brothers William Arthur Jones and Jonathan R. Jones married sisters Maude Samples and Harriet Samples. Both couples are buried at Salem Cemetery in Independence, Missouri. See the Jones family
Gale Fulghum’s memoir describes being raised by “foster grandparents” on a Kansas farm. They were Sybil’s uncle and aunt, John William and Clara Holt. Since Gale was not Sybil’s biological child, the Holts had no blood connection to him at all. The word “foster” was more literal than Gale may have intended.
Gale carried three surnames in his life. He was born “Infant Lloyd” (his biological mother’s maiden name), renamed Aura Gale Orrill by his custodial parents, then became Gale Fulghum when his stepfather adopted him. His memoir spelled the middle surname as “Orille”; a WikiTree profile eventually connected the dots to Orrill.
Gale Fulghum kept an envelope labeled “do not open until my death” for his entire adult life. Inside was his original 1923 birth certificate, naming Clara Francis Loyd as his biological mother. Clara was 19, unmarried, and gave birth at Kansas City’s General Hospital. She married Earl Mead Cowden 39 days later and raised seven children in Colorado. She and Gale were alive simultaneously for 61 years. There is no evidence they ever met again.
Randolph Holt I arrived in Virginia around 1620 as a thirteen year old indentured servant aboard the ship George, bound to Dr. John Pott, physician general to the colony. The 1624/5 Muster records him among “Doctor Pott’s Men in the Maine.” He is the deepest confirmed ancestor in the Holt line and a qualifying ancestor for the Jamestowne Society.
John Holt, eldest son of Randall Holt Jr., inherited the family’s Hog Island plantation but suffered from what the records call “a very great Indisposition of Mind.” After his death by suicide (~1705), the estate was forfeited to the Crown under felo de se law. Governor Edward Nott petitioned on behalf of the five surviving children, and Queen Anne herself commanded the estate’s restoration in January 1706.