1825: William Clark Falkner, Faulkner’s great-grandfather, is born near Knoxville, Tennessee. He is a model for Colonel John Sartoris, who appears in or is referred to in several of Faulkner’s books, beginning with Sartoris.

1842: William C. Falkner arrives in the north Mississippi town of Ripley, apprentices himself to law, and prospers.

1846: William C. Falkner serves as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army in the Mexican War and is wounded, losing the joints of two fingers.

1848: William C. Falkner marries Holland Pearce of Ripley. John Wesley Thompson Falkner, the grandfather of Faulkner and a model for old Bayard Sartoris, the Young Colonel in Sartoris, is born in Ripley. The child is named after John Wesley Thompson, an uncle by marriage of William C. Falkner.

1849: William C. Falkner kills the son of a prominent local man in a dispute on the streets of Ripley and is acquitted on grounds of self-defense. His young wife, Holland, dies of tuberculosis.

1851: William C. Falkner kills another local man on the streets of Ripley and is again acquitted by reason of self-defense. He places his son by his late wife in the care of the John Wesley Thompsons, with the understanding that he will never take the child from them. Living in Cincinnati, William C. Falkner publishes at his own expense two book-length romantic narrative poems, The Siege of Monterrey and The Spanish Heroine. In the fall he returns to Ripley and marries Lizzie Vance. Of their eight children, four survive infancy and only three live beyond their twenties: daughters Effie, Willie Medora, and Alabama LeRoy.

1861: The Civil War begins. William C. Falkner organizes the Magnolia Rifles, a Confederate regiment, and is elected commander with the rank of colonel, a title he will carry until his death.

1862: The Magnolia Rifles elect a new commander. Keeping his rank, Colonel Falkner returns to Ripley and raises another regiment, the First Mississippi Partisan Rangers. They operate locally for one year.

1863: Colonel Falkner disappears from the official record of the war effort.

1865: The war ended, Colonel Falkner reestablishes his business affairs and buys land, quickly becoming one of the most prosperous men of north Mississippi.

1869: Colonel Falkner’s son by his first marriage, John Wesley Thompson Falkner, completes law studies and marries Sallie McAlpine Murry, daughter of a prominent Ripley physician.

1870: John and Sallie Falkner’s first child, Murry Cuthbert Falkner, the novelist’s father, is born in Ripley.

1871: Colonel Falkner is president of the newly incorporated Ripley Railroad and proposes to build a narrow-gauge line north from Ripley to Middleton, Tennessee, a junction point for an east-west rail line.

1872: Colonel Falkner’s railroad opens its first twenty-six miles of track, the segment between Ripley and Middleton. The first stop north of Ripley is called “Falkner,” which Faulkner will later falsely claim to be the family’s place of origin.

1881: Colonel Falkner’s romantic first novel, The White Rose of Memphis, is published by G. W. Carleton of New York and S. Low of London; the book remains in print well into the twentieth century.

1882: Colonel Falkner’s second novel, The Little Brick Church, is published by Lippincott of Philadelphia.

1884: Colonel Falkner tours Europe, sending reports to the Ripley newspaper. Upon his return, his Rapid Ramblings in Europe is published by Lippincott.

1885: John Falkner moves his family to Oxford, Mississippi; Colonel Falkner’s wife, Lizzie, moves the same year to nearby Memphis, Tennessee, with their two unmarried daughters. Recent research by historian Joel Williamson suggests that Colonel Falkner had sired children by an African American woman who worked for his household, and that Lizzie may have moved away because of this affair.

1889: Colonel Falkner is killed on the streets of Ripley by R. J. Thurmond, a former partner in the railroad business. The shooting takes place in daylight in front of witnesses, but Thurmond is acquitted in a sensational trial.

1896: Murry Falkner marries Maud Butler of Oxford, the best friend of his sister, Holland. They move to New Albany, Mississippi, where Murry works as freight agent for the family railroad, now called the Gulf and Chicago Railroad. The following year Maud Falkner gives birth to William Cuthbert Falkner, the writer, who later changes the spelling of his last name to Faulkner.