Prince Family History
Anecdotes about the Prince family
Compiled by Kent Prince, 2018
Winner Prince, editor and publisher of The Newton Record weekly newspaper from 1937-72, cautiously agreed to run the paper when his wife’s father, W.C. Mabry, who bought the Record in 1926, needed someone to handle publication after he became postmaster. The Record was a family operation: Annie Rose Mabry ran the front office; Lorene Mabry Prince wrote great chunks of the copy.
Winner Prince was not a Newton native. He moved to Newton in the Depression, after he lost a job with the state highway department and his wife Lorene became a teacher at Newton High School. Winner’s roots were in the four corners area of Neshoba/Noxubee/Winston/Kemper counties, where his parents and grandparents had lived since the mid-1800s. Richard Prince, Winner’s great-grandfather, had died suddenly in 1849 in Alabama at the age of 45 without leaving a will. Consequently, the children and the family plantation were placed under court guardianship, leaving extensive records about their lives and expenditures. The oldest daughter married a school teacher, who soon moved across the state line into Mississippi to open his own boarding school at Gholson in Noxubee County, and her younger brother Enos, who was to become Winner’s grandfather, moved there in 1854. Almost all of Enos’ brothers served in the Civil War, after which Enos married and had one son, William R. “Willie” Prince.
Willie’s mother, Mary Jane Vandevender Prince, has a clear lineage that can be tracked back to Revolutionary times and Christopher Vandevender, who was born in 1777. Christopher’s story, recorded by a grandson early in the 20th Century, lists Christopher’s grandparents on his mother’s side as being from Alsace-Lorraine, France. (Land’s VanDevender History)
However new genealogy on the internet seems to trace the family all the way back to Holland in the 1600s and earlier. That crossing relative would likely have been Jan Pietersz Van Deventer, born about 1627, a tailor who sailed to America in 1662 on De Hoop (The Hope) with his wife Maria Hoogeboom. (VanDevender Genealogy)
Hunting for the Prince crossing relative hits a wall before the family migrated into Alabama in the early 1800s. There is reference to several Princes in the 1891 book “Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Mississippi” that has a whole page on the Civil War generation. It says the family descended from a John Prince in Virginia, but no genealogy records have surfaced on it. And nothing takes the Prince family back to Europe.
One thing seems certain, Christopher is the first in the line to die in Mississippi. He is buried at Old Salem Cemetery in Kemper County.
Linked here is a narrative of family history that attempts to draw out the character of the people rather than track out a list of ancestors’ names. It runs from a few years before the Civil War to the mid-20th Century, covering some of what is known about the Princes and the maternal line of Winner’s mother and the Lukes. To round out part of Winner’s story, a couple of short pieces about his newspaper world are also included.
Editor Prince and The Newton Record (Left-Click on link to view)
From a memoir in the centennial edition of the Record 2010 by Kent Prince
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