Margaret Mitchell - Family History

Family History

Margaret Mitchell was a Southerner and a lifelong resident and native of Atlanta, Georgia, who was born in 1900 into a wealthy and politically prominent family. Her father, Eugene Muse Mitchell, was an attorney, and her mother, Mary Isabel "May Belle" (or "Maybelle") Stephens, was a suffragist. She had two brothers, Russell Stephens Mitchell, who died in infancy in 1894, and Alexander Stephens Mitchell, born in 1896.

Mitchell's family on her father's side were descendants of Thomas Mitchell, originally of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, who settled in Wilkes County, Georgia in 1777, and served in the American Revolutionary War. Her grandfather, Russell Crawford Mitchell, of Atlanta, enlisted in the Confederate States Army in July 1861, and was later severely wounded at the Battle of Sharpsburg. After the Civil War, he made a large fortune supplying lumber to rapidly building Atlanta. Russell Mitchell had twelve children from two wives; the eldest was Eugene, who graduated from the University of Georgia Law School.

Mitchell's maternal great-grandfather, Philip Fitzgerald, emigrated from Ireland, and eventually settled on a slaveholding plantation near Jonesboro, Georgia, where he had one son and seven daughters with his wife, Elenor. Mitchell's grandparents, married in 1863, were Annie Fitzgerald and John Stephens, who had also emigrated from Ireland and was a Captain in the Confederate States Army. John Stephens was a prosperous real estate developer after the Civil War and one of the founders of the Gate City Street Railroad (1881), a mule-drawn Atlanta trolley system. John and Annie Stephens had twelve children together; the seventh child was May Belle Stephens, who married Eugene Mitchell. May Belle Stephens had studied at the Bellevue Convent in Quebec and completed her education at the Atlanta Female Institute.

The Atlanta Constitution reported that May Belle Stephens and Eugene Mitchell were married at her father's mansion on November 8, 1892:

...the maid of honor, Miss Annie Stephens, was as pretty as a French pastel, in a directoire costume of yellow satin with a long coat of green velvet sleeves, and a vest of gold brocade...The bride was a fair vision of youthful loveliness in her robe of exquisite ivory white and satin...her slippers were white satin wrought with pearls...an elegant supper was served. The dining room was decked in white and green, illuminated with numberless candles in silver candlelabras...The bride's gift from her father was an elegant house and lot...At 11 o'clock Mrs. Mitchell donned a pretty going-away gown of green English cloth with its jaunty velvet hat to match and bid goodbye to her friends.