Creole Coast: Lecture by Richard Hobs Allan

Richard Hobs Allan grew up in Moss Point, Mobile, and Pascagoula and has continued to research the history of the Gulf South throughout his career. His family has long had ancestral roots to the coast that he has documented through storytelling in his two-volume series, Torn Apart. 

Torn Apart is a genealogical study of the author’s family roots from the 1600s through the 1890s. Much more than births, marriages and deaths, it is a collection of stories of the Creole Coast, where generations of different peoples -  speaking Choctaw, French, Bambarra, and later, English - created a unique multi-race democracy lasting more than a century.

Allan’s journey through his ancestry began with the inheriting of a portrait of the Choctaw coastal chief Jean-Baptiste Baudrau dit Graveline II, which had been handed down through his maternal line across seven generations. Allen’s talk describes how this impacted the creation of Torn Apart, and…