The story
The family's own published genealogy, printed in 1921, opens with Henry Catching, said to have sat on the first court ever held in Norfolk Parish, Virginia, in 1638 — a generation before most of this tree's immigrant ancestors had even sailed. But between that man and the first proven ancestor lie roughly 125 years with no records at all. Nobody has ever produced the generations in between; the 1921 book itself only offers a guess, and calls it one. So Henry is best understood as the family's oldest claim, not its oldest documented ancestor. The line, as it can actually be shown, begins in Georgia.
The generation that made the family's fortune was the Revolutionary cohort of Wilkes County, Georgia — four probable brothers whose parents are unproven. Major Benjamin sat as an assistant judge at the tory trials recorded in Wilkes County's famous dog-skin minute book and took over a thousand acres of bounty land; Joseph enlisted at fifteen; ours was Meredith Catching Sr., with grants on Little River and Kettle Creek. Dying in July 1798, he deeded nine slaves to his son and was gone within days, intestate. His wife Anastasia — probably a widow when he married her — left a will in 1807 naming the whole blended household, her Madden and Wilkes sons beside the Catching children. That will has been read on the image of the original Georgia record book: she made her mark on 6 March 1807 and it was sworn in court on 6 April, so she died within that month.
By 1830 the family was farming the Crow Creek valley of Franklin County, Tennessee, under the scarp of the Cumberland Plateau. The surname flickers in the records — “Kitchens” in the 1850 census, “Catchings” in 1860 — one family throughout, the clerk just writing what he heard. It stuck to the landscape too: the railroad stop there was called Kitchen's Station, or Catchings Station, until the local paper announced its renaming to Sherwood in 1878.
The best document from that valley is a young man's deathbed will from the spring of 1857. Meredith's namesake son, dying before his father, listed what he had: the household and kitchen furniture, the corn and bacon on hand, a cow and calf, thirteen head of stock, a bee gum, and his mare — to be sold and the money held in trust by his brother-in-law for two small daughters. It is a whole farm in six lines.
Benjamin Franklin Catchings Sr. died young too, leaving Malissa a widow at about thirty-eight with nine children and $370 to her name. The war took more: her eldest enlisted in June 1861 in the 17th Tennessee Infantry, raised in Franklin County and bled at Stones River; family tradition says he died in a Confederate hospital at Tullahoma. Afterward the widow gathered the younger children and went to Texas, settling in Travis and Williamson counties near her Rose relatives.
Benjamin Franklin Jr. was about eleven when he made that crossing. He married Mary Alice Craig in Austin in January 1882 and raised eleven children. Their firstborn, James Thomas Catchings, was born in Travis County in 1882, farmed at Taft in San Patricio County, and married Ada Mae Johnson in Austin in 1909 — joining this line to the Johnson room.