Sure it is in Yankeetown on the gulf coast of Florida, Paramount shot Follow That Dream staring Elvis on our property. We have a plaque from paramount with pictures of Elvis and the rest of the cast thanking my family for the use of the homestead. These pictures have never been released to the public. In one of the pictures there is a blond boy standing on the porch and Elvis is sitting on the porch swing. That boy was a yet to be Famous Tom Petty. His uncle worked as one of the set crew.
My great grandfather was a hunting guide and met Elvis years before they shot the film one time when he took him and his friends hunting. Elvis and my great grandfather hit it off, and he would come and hunt every year. They became lifelong friends.
Anyways, my family where Corsican merchants, they where attacked in Tampa bay when the pirates laid siege to the city of Tampa. They lost their boat, and when you loose your boat in the new world unless you are rich, your pretty much a citizen of the new world.
Some of my family headed east to the fort in Saint Augustine and then settled down the east coast and eventually married into another old Florida family called the Summerlins also known as the Summerals and the Summerlands (hence the name of the island I live on). One of my distant (some kind of great great) uncles was the first child born after the purchase of Florida by the US, thus making him the first natural born US citizen from Florida. His name was Jacob Summerlin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Summerlin
He went on to be a cattle Barron and donate most of what is now downtown Orlando to the city or Orlando. Summerlin boulevard in Orlando is named after him.
Anyways, my relatives on the east coast went as far as south as Ft. Pierce until Henry Flaglar came and started building the railroad. Some of them joined it and worked it to Key West (my immediate family was not part of that first group, my dad was a treasure diver for Mel Fisher and that is how I ended up down here). That is how some of us spread down here. But most of the family that ended up in Ft. Pierce, took up commercial fishing and branched towards the Bahamas and started setting up camps in Bimini, Spanish Wells, and Andros. Some liked it over there and began to make it their base of operation and the family spread to the Bahamas.
It's pretty cool, I have a lot of family in Florida and the Bahamas when the reality is almost everyone that lives in Florida is not from Florida and it really gives you perspective, the old Florida was nothing like the Florida Man articles you read about Florida today.
