The migration of family into Georgia along with other settlers was a key stage of development of our country. However this had to be done with the displacement of the Cherokee Indians, commonly called the Trail of Tears. Our family’s role appears to have several facets.

First, Private James Orear served for 3 months in the Highland Battalion of Mounted Volunteers in the Georgia Troops during the Cherokee Disturbance & Removal of 1836. (From In the Index to Volunteer Soldiers in Indian Wars and Disturbances, 1815-1858 via Chad O’Rear 1998)

According to pp.s 3-4 of Mrs. Edith (O'Rear) Craig's narrative written in the 1930s, the story of the O’Rear migration is as follows. "When the family moved to Jasper in the early 1830s, certain members of the family chose to remain around Winchester [TN]. . . . Among the ones who did not move were Daniel and Susan Gooch O'Rear [who] stayed behind. Some of their married children may have been the attraction that kept them there. However, in the very late thirties, when the Cherokee Indians were moved out and when Daniel O'Rear was in his late 80s, they moved down into GA to the general area of Summerville. In the early 1840s, his [Daniel's] grandchildren [sons of John] George and Marion were going around central and north Alabama doing construction work, since such work was plentiful in the newly opened country. During 1843 their father [John] wrote them from Jasper asking them to work their way up toward Summerville to look after their grandfather who was in bad health and needed their help. So it was that the brothers came into the northwest corner of Georgia and did some construction work for a prominent man of the area, Samuel Freeman Force . . ."