Moses family papers

Montgomery Moses (1808-1886) was born to Esther Phillips (1778-1845) and Major Myer Moses (1779-1833) in Charleston, South Carolina. Montgomery married his first cousin Catherine Phillips (1809-1885) in Philadelphia in 1832 and went into law partnership with his brother Franklin I. Moses in Sumter, South Carolina. After the Civil War, Montgomery and Catherine moved to Newberry, South Carolina. In 1871, he was elected circuit judge. He and Catherine had nine children, Myer Buchanan Moses (1833-1889), Zalegman Phillips Moses (1835-1889), Franklin Moses (1837-1907), Arabella Phillips Moses (1839-1927), Henry Claremont Moses (1841-1905), Rebecca Phillips Moses (1843-1848), Altamont Moses (1846-1905), Catherine Esther Moses Werber (1852-1938), and Rachel, who died young.

Altamont Moses served in the Civil War on the Confederate side as a military telegraph operator. After the war, he returned to his hometown of Sumter, South Carolina, and in 1870 married Octavia Cohen. The couple had seven children: Altamont Moses Jr., who died as an infant, Katherine Moses (1874-1954), Herbert Altamont Moses (1876-1969), Vivian Mordaunt Moses (1878-1957), Emile Phillips Moses (1880-1965), Armida Moses Jennings (1884-1933), and Henry Phillips Moses (1886-1945). Altamont Sr. became an established merchant in Sumter, as well as a notable civic and political leader. He served as a delegate of Sumter County at the South Carolina Democratic State Convention in 1868. In 1886-ten years after the end of Reconstruction-he was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives, then in 1894 to the state senate, and, in 1898, he returned as a representative in the legislature. Besides his political career, he served as master of the Claremont Free and Accepted Mason Lodge and president of the Sumter Hebrew Benevolent Society and Sumter Society of Israelites.