Asa was the second of twelve children born to Simeon and Mildred White Oliver. Born in Elbert County, Georgia, he moved along with his parents and other neighbors and relatives to North Mississippi during the mid-1830's. Simeon's family settled in DeSoto County, while others of the extended clan made Panola County, a few miles to the south, their home. Asa, along with his father, was a planter. This group of Georgians was well off, owning slaves and planting vast acres of cotton. Asa met and married Beatrice Elizabeth Tait about 1850. They had two children in Mississippi: Indiana and Mildred. Then, in the mid-1850s, this family moved to Austin County, now Waller County, Texas. The "Handbook of Texas Online" adds the following information for him: "By 1860 he had accumulated 105 slaves and held property worth $205,000, ranking him among the county's wealthiest residents." He ended the Civil War a full Colonel, but like most large planters he was badly damaged by the Confederate defeat and emancipation. "By mid-1865 his estate had plummeted in value to $25,000. In 1866 he and his wife and three children joined the postbellum emigration of former Confederates to Latin America; they settled in the colony of Santa Barbara D'Oeste in the Campinas district of São Paulo province, Brazil. There Oliver purchased an extensive plantation and a number of slaves and began cultivating his property." Unfortunately, his wife, Beatrice, and daughter, Indiana, contracted tuberculosis. Beatrice succumbed to the disease on July 13, 1868. Since there were no non-Catholic cemeteries nearby, Oliver devoted a small corner of one of his fields to burials and interred his wife there. Indiana, age seventeen, died on April 19, 1869, of the disease and was buried near her mother. That same year Oliver's younger daughter, Mildred, fourteen, distraught over the deaths of her mother and sister and burdened with the care of her father and younger brother, also fell gravely ill; she died shortly before Christmas and was interred beside her loved ones. The family burial ground, known as the "Campo," became a significant Protestant cemetery for the American settlers of the vicinity. A. T. Oliver was buried beside his family after he was murdered by one of his slaves on July 28, 1873. Subsequent owners of the Oliver property erected a small chapel on the cemetery grounds."

Family links and bio contributed by Pat Iverson (#46836677)