Who is Paul Brown, who wrote the retrospective articles that appear in this section?

Paul Lafayette Brown, born in Guinea, was a chronicler of the region and its families, said Hamilton Williams, who pursues similar interests today.

“Paul was an early respected and prominent Guinea genealogist keeping track of Guinea families,” said Williams. “He would often go to the clerk’s office in Gloucester courthouse and sit in there and copy old court records and deed books. He copied them in a spiral notebook with a ballpoint pen and did not make mistakes. He always had up-to-date family information” if you were working on your family tree.

He said the Buck’s Store Museum in Bena has many of Brown’s materials.

Williams has fond memories of Mr. Brown, who was born and grew up in the Severn area of Guinea. “He had a large family. Most of his brothers went off in World War II.” Paul was among those in the service, and the Gazette-Journal in 1944 said he was in the field artillery at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

“My earliest recollection of Paul Brown is as the Junior Sunday School Department Superintendent at Union Baptist Church, Achilles, in the old wooden building when it was across the highway from the present brick structure. That would have been when I was 9 or 10 years old and I was in that department,” said Williams.

From his research, Brown was able to write detailed stories about years gone by in Guinea; two of them are in this section.

In addition, he was a longtime Sunday School teacher at Union Baptist Church, teaching intermediate boys ages 10-14. Williams was one of his students, and said Mr. Brown “was a well-respected teacher.”

Brown worked on the Gloucester Point-York River ferry and later at a government installation south of the York River, and as he grew older, he moved to the Peninsula where he spent his final days.

Paul Brown, the chronicler, was born in 1921, the seventh of eight children of Alton Jones Brown Sr. and Lela Elizabeth Thomas Brown. He died in 2006.