Francis Emmet Buford

The first born of a dozen children of the former Lucy Ann Rice (1817-1895) and her husband William Pegram Buford (1807-1868). His father farmed using enslaved labor at "Farmington" in Brunswick County and like his wife survived the American Civil War. William P. Buford served as the Brunswick county sheriff for many years, and his father (this man's grandfather), Abraham Buford of Lunenburg County to the southwest, had served as captain during the War of 1812.^[1] This man could trace his paternal ancestry to John Beaufort or Buford, who in 1635 emigrated to then barely developed Lancaster County in the Northern Neck of the relatively new colony, but whose descendants moved to the southwest. His mother was the daughter of Col. William Rice of Brunswick County.^[2] Buford had at least two younger brothers who never married. James Rice Buford (1845-1913) served as a Confederate cavalryman and courier during the conflict and remained in Brunswick County, but Preston Buford (1856-1930, who was too young to serve) moved to near Winston-Salem in Caswell County, North Carolina with his schoolteacher sister Jennie and possibly with his brother Charlie and youngest sister Frances Rice Buford. Their sister Margaret Susan Buford (1841-1910) cared for her mother and then father at Farmington east of Lawrenceville, and outlived her sisters Lelia Fitzwilliam Buford Robins (1839-1906) who married after the conflict and moved to Gloucester County, Virginia, and possibly Mary Elizabeth Buford Phillips (1843- ) who married and became active in the United Daughters of the Confederacy in New York City while living with one of her daughters in New Jersey.

In any event Francis Emmet Buford received an education appropriate to his class. He attended the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg in 1853, then the University of Virginia Law School in Charlottesville.^[3][4]

In 1858 Buford married Martha (Pattie) Stone Hicks, granddaughter of lawyer and former North Carolina judge and Governor David Stone. Her father was prominent Brunswick County lawyer Edward Hicks. Her mother had died when Pattie was very young, and she was raised by her aunt Martha, and both women took care of her father when he became an invalid. Although herself later subject to a long illness (as was this man her husband), Pattie was a strong-willed woman, and one rumor claimed she married in order to circumvent a clause in her father's will which would have given her brother David control of her marriage. Francis and Pattie Buford had four sons and two daughters who reached adulthood, of whom Emmet (1861-1910) was the eldest but Edward P. Buford (1865-1931) outlived his male siblings and followed his father's path into the law and legislature. His brother Frank (1868-1910) helped and briefly succeeded their father as editor of the Brunswick Gazette. Their sister Elizabeth (1863-1951) married Rev. Robert Strange Jr. (who became bishop of East Carolina but left her a widow so she returned to Lawrenceville) and outlived her siblings, and their sister Mary (1884-1922) married Dr. Robert Martin of Petersburg, but died in Richmond.^[5]