Accessed at http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~msissaq2/balfour.html on 2011-05-24.

John W. Balfour (born ca. 1830 in Madison County), son of William Lovett Balfour is found in the 1860 Madison County census. He married Mary Coburn Humphreys on June 11, 1854 in Claiborne County. Mary was the daughter of David George and Mary Coburn Humphreys of Claiborne County. Her father was born on the Hermitage Plantation, situated on the banks of Bayou Pierre in Claiborne County on May 17, 1794. According to the book The Humphreys Family in America, "he was a Southern planter of the highest type, without pride or pretention and a gentleman by nature and by practice". John W. and Mary Coburn Humphreys Balfour, according to the 1860 Federal census, were the parents of the following children: George (born 1855) and William Suggs (born 1858). John W. was commissioned a Colonel in the Confederate infantry during the Civil War and by 1864 was living in Tuskegee, Alabama with his family. Frances Woolfolk Wallace wrote in her diary, dated Montgomery, Friday, July 15, 1864: "Feel very badly, did not sleep much, mosquitoes so bad. I really am afraid I cannot stand the trip if I travel all day and sleep none at night. Went this morning to ride, went to the cemetery and saw little Georgie Balfour's tomb. The inscription was two verses of the little hymn "I Want to be an Angel," the same my own sweet Georgie often repeats. I thought Oh, shall he too sleep in an unknown tomb in a strange land and among strange people. Little Georgie Balfour was the son of our kind friends and died in Montgomery with dyptheria as they were moving from Mississippi to Tuskegee as refugees. My own little boy reminded them so much of their lost one."