"Job and His Daughters" by William Blake (1805).

She was born on 30 March 1860 in what was then rural DeKalb County, Georgia, but is now suburban East Point in central Fulton County. She was the youngest daughter of John Lee (1792–1865) and his second wife Nancy Holder Lee (1829–1901), one of six children they would have together. I had always wondered how all of the Kerron Hoppocks (in a variety of spellings) I've run across during the course of historical research could have been related. Now I know, I think, per the wisdom of wikipedia. Keren-happuch (Hebrew:  קֶרֶן הַפּוּךְ‎, Qeren Happūk, "Horn of kohl”) was the youngest of the three daughters of Job, given to him late in life after his tribulations. She and her older sisters Jemima and Keziah are mentioned only once in the Bible, in Job 42:14, but many women bore those sisters' names. John Lee was 68 years old when Kerron was born, the penultimate of fifteen children he sired with two wives over more than four decades.

John Lee, ca. 1864

Nancy Holder Lee, ca. 1900

The old Lee homeplace, from the south, ca. 1920.

The west side of the Lees' house, ca. 1920.

She grew up on the family farm, some 300 acres, bisected more or less east to west by Camp Creek, one of the several large creeks flowing to the west out of Atlanta into the Chattahoochee River, with its particular headwaters in what are now College Park and Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Running northeast to southwest across the farm was then known as the Newnan Wagon Road, but has been Washington Road since the 1930s.

She was four years old when the Civil War came to Georgia and the Union armies swept their way from Ezra Church to Jonesboro in August of 1864. Her half brother Thomas had died at Vicksburg in July 1863, and several other relatives wasted years of their lives for the Confederacy. She was three months short of her fifth birthday when her father died in January 1865. Out of her five siblings, Roxanne, "Axie," was the oldest and she was only eleven. There is no way to know how the family scraped by, but they did.

Her mother never remarried, but Kerron and her siblings grew up amid a sprawling family of aunts, uncles, and cousins. She had nine half-siblings, all but one of whom were grown and married by the time she was born, but four of them with their families lived within a mile of the home place. One of them, Elzy Franklin Lee, gave the land for Mt. Olive Missionary Baptist Church when it was established in 1872; many of John Lee's descendants are buried there.

On Christmas Eve 1882, she married Manson Leander Betterton (1856–1938), son of Joseph R. and Nancy Hutcheson Betterton. He had grown up in the Poplar Springs District (now Riverdale) in northwestern Clayton County, near where Kerron's half-brother Seaborn Anderson Lee had a mill. Kerron and Manson, too, began farming nearby, before they bought or were given 67 acres just down the road from her widowed mother. It is unclear if they built the house they occupied or it was already in place. Their first child, Mary Lee, was born in October 1883, and she was followed by Harvey Jefferson in January 1885. That June, Mary Lee died, followed by her brother in June 1886. The following fall, however, Kerron gave birth again, this time to the first of six children that would survive childhood—Nancy Lena (1887–1905), Charles Marcus (1889–1958), Joseph Tossie (1892–1970), Nora Bessie (1894–1984), Maggie Geneva (1896–1969), Bertha Belle (1898–1984), and Janie Agnas (1902–1941). In 1903 and again in 1905, she bore a child that did not live long enough to be named.

The Bettertons in front of their house in Arab, Alabama.

Kerron and Manson Betterton, ca. 1910.

Harvey Jefferson Betterton, laid out for his wake, June 1886.

Kerron (left rear) and her sisters.

Kerron's brothers Jasper and Ipson.

Kerron Lee Betterton

By then the family had relocated to a small farm two or three mile north of Arab, Alabama, a village in Marshall County 30 or 35 miles south of Huntsville. It was first settled by one Stephen Tuttle Thompson (1832–1912) in the late 1850s, and he was named postmaster when the first post office was established there in 1882. The post office was supposed to honor his son Arad Thompson (1869–1949), but because of a clerical error in Washington DC, it was named Arab instead. The town was incorporated in 1892.

Kerron and Manson Betterton continued on their small farm as their children grew to adulthood. Most of them married into neighboring families in the first quarter of the twentieth century and many of them settled down, lived their lives, and died in Marshall County. Manson Betterton died in February 1938 and Kerron in October. Both of them, along with a number of their descendants, are buried in the Gilliam Springs Baptist Church Cemetery two miles or so north of Arab.

Kerron and Manson Betterton in front of what was presumably their last house in Marshall County, Alabama.