James Kipp of Tennessee
James Kipp was born on January 14, 1810, in Fentress County, Tennessee.1 This is the earliest date for which a primary genealogical record survives in the family's own keeping.
They raised five sons: John A. (b. February 18, 1837), Pleasant DoC (b. February 13, 1839), Alvin Kalo (b. March 8, 1841 — through whom this descent line runs), James K.P. (b. June 5, 1844), and William O.B. (b. June 29, 1848).4
The Tennessee that James Kipp was born into was a state only fourteen years old; the United States itself was thirty-four years old, with a population of seven million. Fentress County, where he was born, had been organized only in 1823 — so for his first thirteen years he was technically born in a county that did not yet have its name. Family lore preserved in the binder says the Kipps had come down from West Virginia; the binder's author wrote, "as far as it is possible to trace back, our paternal forefathers first lived in West Virginia." That deeper claim is family memory, not a record, and is treated here as context rather than as a sourced fact.7
On the spelling. The family Bible — photographs of which are in the binder — recorded the surname as Knip. By the 1900s, written records were settling on Knipp. The form Kipp, used in the prose of these chapters, is a 20th-century family preference. All three appear in the surviving record; they are the same family.8
Artifacts
Photos, scans, and documents that back this chapter. Each carries a SHA256 fingerprint so the file can be independently verified as unchanged since upload, and a short code — the tiny adjective-noun pair below each card — for compact reference (e.g. lineage.sent.li/a/sage-pine).