After High School, I enrolled in Hardin Junior College in Wicita Falls.  It cost pactically nothing--about 120 d0llars per year.   It took every dollar I had made that summer working on an oil rig near San Angelo. It was on the property of my prosperous cousin, a rancher with hundreds of acres where ran cattle and angora goats.

The name--Demere--was nounced a great deal differently in West Texas--Demry--was as close as it came to the original French. No Texan could ever come close, so Demry was just fine, and logical.

The name along with two brothers came from France in the early 1700s.  My cousin in Memphis has prepared an exhaustive history of the Demere family from its beginning. 

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Over the last half millennium, the Demere family has been involved in several pivotal situations in the history of France, Britain, and America. Participants in the original bittersweet antebellum tradition of the South, the Demere descendants built wealth, prosperity and a plantation lifestyle, only to fall to the Union torch.

Twice undergoing a diaspora, the family was scattered first from France by Roman Catholic persecution of the Huguenots, and finally throughout America by the economic havoc visited by the War Between the States. Family members of the past have been returned to life by historical novels of the present, most recently in Eugenia Price’s bestseller, Beauty from Ashes.

The Deméré’s fellow Huguenots had begun their military tradition during the 16^th century Wars of Religion in France. After fleeing Roman Catholic persecution in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries, many Huguenots found welcome in the British Army. The two sons of Huguenots Isaac and Marie Demeré born in early 18^th century France traveled the world in the service of King George II as British Army officers, engaged their king’s enemies, and became the source of the family in America. One would die at an old age having become a prosperous sea island planter in 1760’s Georgia, and his brother would perish grievously on the South Carolina frontier.

The Demerés would help to cement the British claim to North America, to fight for both the Georgia and South Carolina colonies, and would be the first official British in what is now the State of Tennessee. There were few Redcoat officers serving in the Colonies at the time and, therefore, the brothers participated in a variety of historical episodes throughout the colonies. These events were broadly recorded in hundreds of their surviving letters and military reports.

The early colonies were literally shaped by the British military, and the Redcoat warriors Raymond and Paul Demeré had an active hand in that formation. The harsh reality of their lives reminds us what life was truly like in the colonial South.

The Demere families in America today are a branch of one of the two halves of the family tree begun by these two men. Both brothers came to the Georgia colony at St. Simons Island. Raymond’s descendants stayed there for generations (the St. Simons Island Branch), whereas Paul’s descendants migrated to the environs of Savannah, Georgia (the Savannah Branch).

Their Patriot and Loyalist descendants of these warriors personify the political and economic events of the country’s youth. Demeres fought alongside George Washington in two wars and knew him well. Branches of the family were ravaged by each military action on Southern American soil, most devastatingly by the War Between the States. The soil of magnolias, live oak, and Spanish moss from which they harvested the fine Sea Island cotton, rice, mulberry leaves, and cedar became the soil into which they spilled their blood and buried their dead.

The author is greatly indebted to the many descendants of these early Georgians who have been eager to share their own interest, insight, enthusiasm, and years of research. These ladies and gentlemen of Demere blood surely are, as they were described by one ancestor, “Grand Old Southern Stock.”