Robert was the fourteenth child of Annie and John Quincy Polson.
John Quincy PolsonJohn Quincy Polson was born in Alabama before coming to Mississippi. Before Robert was born, his father and family lived and worked on a rented farm around Errata since at least before the 1910 Census, directly northeast of Laurel. During the early 1920s, the Polsons moved into Laurel, and John Quincy worked as a roper at the Laurel Textile cotton mill on 13th Avenue.
Meanwhile, the family rented a home on 214 North 14th Avenue. This was the house Robert was born into. John Quincy was not a veteran of any conflict, nor did he ever attend school. Continuing a tradition within the family, John was named after President John Quincy Adams. |
Annie Isabelle Ulmer PolsonAnnie Isabelle Ulmer Polson was a Mississippi native. Like John Quincy, she also had not attended school. For her entire life, she was a homemaker, a difficult job considering the number of children in the household at any given point.
Annie married John Quincy, nine years her senior, sometime on or after his twenty-eighth birthday and before her eighteenth birthday in 1903. Their marriage would continue until John Quincy’s death from cancer in 1935, at the age of sixty, when Robert was only ten years old. Annie would remain a widow for the rest of her life and was interred next to John Quincy in the Laurel Cemetery, dying at age eighty-two. |