R: Emma, would you please tell us about your birthplace, your parents, and
your grandparents?
D: Yes, I was born on February 12, 1909 in Mansfield, Louisiana. My father was
a Baptist minister named Jarrell Dean Adcock, whose parents were farmers in
west Tennessee near Jackson. His parents were Caroline Mills and Alfred
Marion Adcock, both of whom died by the time my father was fourteen.
R: That name is spelled A-D-C-O-C-K ?
D: That's right. Since he lived with sisters and brothers until he went to
college, I do not know a great deal about his family except for four genera-
tions back to Virginia and North Carolina. My mother was Frances Davidson
Rives, which is spelled R-I-V-E-S. Her parents were Albert Martin Rives
and Emma Virginia Durham.
R: So you're named Emma from your maternal grandmother.
D: And Caroline from my father's mother. From two grandmothers. The family
records go back to the sixteenth century but the Rives and the other members
of the maternal side came to Virginia between 1620 and 1638.
R: That is why she can go in the South, isn't it?
D: Yes, and I think so far as I know, all of the family were in the South except
my maternal great-grandmother who eloped from Nova Scotia to South Carolina.
Her name was Maria Martin arid she married Davidson.
R: I see, would you have come from the Canadian French?
D: The reason I was born in Mansfield is because it's my mother's home and my
father had just accepted a call to Nicholasville, Kentucky, where we lived
until 1911.
R: Nicholasville, Kentucky is near what city?
D: I don't know, I was a baby. Anyway,we came to Tallahassee in 1911 and I
wasn't much more than a baby then.
R: Do you remember coming to Tallahassee?
D: No, I was less than two. At the time we got to Tallahassee, it was a very
small town of less than 5,000 and the governor at that time, whom I do not
remember, was Gilchrist [Albert Gilchrist, term: 1913], he had a hobby of
giving people ceramic monkeys -- see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil...
R: Oh yes, I remember those.
D: He gave me one which I kept for many, many years, but somehow I lost them
in one of our many moves.
R: Did your father have a church?