More About the Author
Robert Scott Davis, Jr., has more than 1,000 publications dealing with genealogy, history, records, and research, most of which deal with the state of Georgia (USA) in some form or fashion. He has been widely quoted by or appeared in CNN, Time, Smithsonian, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. His work has received awards from the American Association for State and Local History; the Sons of the American Revolution; and the National Genealogical Society. He is a graduate of Piedmont College, North Georgia State College and University, and the University of Alabama in Birmingham.
Raised in Forest Park, Georgia, Bob is the son of the late Robert Scott Davis, Sr. (b. Gainesville, Ga.) and Elizabeth Kathleen Holbert (b. Jasper, Ga.) His work owes everything to his being encouraged and inspired by history teachers including Ted Key, later a Georgia teacher of the year. He first began his writing in 1974 when, as a cadet at then North Georgia College, he worked as Georgia's first history state intern and had been assigned the project of putting together an historical site survey on the little known Kettle Creek Revolutionary War battlefield. Despite the many hundreds of topics he has since explored, he always returns to that singular event and has used it in his most recent and important book, a collection of essays on Americans who supported the King during the American Revolution.
Bob also did a number of books on Georgia records that were published by the late Rev. Silas Emmett Lucas and he regularly contributed to the North Georgia Journal, a popular magazine on the region of Georgia where his family has lived for generations. Most of the latter articles have been reprinted in a series of books compiled by Olin Jackson called A North Georgia Journal of History. Aside from guides to doing research in Alabama and Georgia, he found and annotated the memoirs of Sallie Clayton, a young woman of Civil War Atlanta, and he did a book on the ppreviously lost personal histories of many characters in the tragic story of Andersonville Civil War prison. His most popular books, however, have been his compilations of records of Georgia murderers, liars, prison inmates, and other persons with problems in the state's early history.
Over the years, he has been helped by, and he occasionally helped, Georgia's greatest researchers including E. Merton Coulter, Kenneth H. Thomas Jr., David M. Sherman, Farris Cadle, Carl A. Anderson, and Gordon B. Smith. With the help of such scholars, he has acquired a number of significant historical collections for the Hargrett Library of the University of Georgia (where he deposits his own files) and other libraries. In 1993, he spent a month in Great Britain completing a project for the R. J. Taylor Jr. Foundation to povide the Georgia Archives with the most extensive collection of copies of colonial records fo any of the American British colonies.
Robert S. Davis, as he usually styles himself, lives in Blountsville, Alabama, and curently serves as director of the Family & Regional History Program at Wallace State College in nearby Hanceville. Bob also teaches history and genealogy classes and he frequently speaks to various groups across the country.
