Williams, Rev. John Lancaster

Submitted by Mike Miller

Rev. John L. Williams, a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, for over thirty years, is state superintendent of the Louisiana Child Finding and Home Society, Inc., and has held that office since the organization of the society January 26, 1917. Its offices are at 211 Camp Street in New Orleans.

John Lancaster Williams was born in Lawrence County, Alabama, October 4, 1870, the son of a farmer, but other ancestors were scholars and professional men. His grandfather, Dr. Joseph E. Williams, was for thirty-five years a member of the faculty of the University of Virginia, and on retiring at the age of sixty-three, moved to a plantation in northern Alabama, where he died in 1872. George W. Williams, father of Rev. John L., was reared on the Alabama farm, and devoted his active career to farming. In 1891 he moved to Texas and acquired a valuable farm near Fort Worth. George W. Williams married Sarah S. McVeigh, who finished her education in the Richmond Female College of Virginia, and for a number of years was a teacher. Her father, Lancaster E. Mc Veigh, a native of Richmond, was long recognized as one of the ablest mathematicians in the South. He taught in the University of Virginia; was superintendent of public instruction for the state of Tennessee; was president of the Soule University near Leighton, Alabama, and died at the age of eighty-six, in 1891.

John Lancaster Williams, oldest in a family of five sons, grew up on the farm in northern Alabama, attended local schools and in 1889 graduated from the Southern University at Greensboro, Alabama, taking the Bachelor of Arts degree, and subsequently was given the degree of B. D. by Vanderbilt University at Nashville, where he also completed his divinity course. He was ordained to the Methodist ministry in 1891. For a quarter of a century he was in itinerant ministry, holding pastorates in Alabama, Texas, California, Oklahoma and Louisiana.

The Louisiana Child Finding and Home Society, of which he has been superintendent since 1917, is an inter-denominational charity of Louisiana, organized and incorporated for the purpose of caring for orphans and other dependent children by placing them in proper family homes rather than in institutions and asylums. Under the direction of Rev. Mr. Williams this institution has performed wonderful service and realized the aims of its founders. It is conducted under religious auspices, but independently of politics or denominational control.

Rev. Mr. Williams has been active in all the child welfare organizations at New Orleans and Louisiana. He is a member of the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce, the Masonic fraternity, Independent Order of Odd Fellows and the Woodmen of the World.

A History of Louisiana, (vol. 2), p. 82, by Henry E. Chambers. Published by The American Historical Society, Inc., Chicago and New York, 1925.