Thursday, January 18, 2018

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

I am going to try out Amy Johnson Crow's 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks to see if I can't get myself back on track blogging.  Since we are obviously already in the 3rd week of the year, I'll have to do some backtracking. 

The first prompt - Start

This got me to thinking about where I started doing genealogy which is surprisingly easy.  I was in Georgia for my 16th birthday and my grandmother (who had shown no previous interest in the subject) had received an answer to a query she had sent someone about her ancestor Washington William Buchanan Horne and his confederate service.  The answer showed that he had fought at Vicksburg, was wounded at some point, and had died in the State mental asylum.  This turned out to be a great learning experience for me because almost at once the family started 'remembering' that their ancestor, his daughter, was not really his.  Since they obviously couldn't have an ancestor in the Asylum. 

Years of research have shown that he was in fact paroled at Vicksburg but this was not where he was wounded.  He was exchanged and went back into the service and was wounded (lost an arm) later while fighting in Georgia.  His full name - not on the records - has been determined.  The Asylum records and reminiscences of his grandson showed that he was probably suffering from what today would be called PTSD.  And both paper research and DNA have fairly conclusively proven that he was the father of Carrie Horne.  There are still members of the family who are 'sure' that Carrie's father was a mailman (didn't exist at that time in rural areas) named Campbell (of whom there were none in that county.) 

The other and to me more interesting document in the file was the Confederate pension application for his wife Mary Ann Morris Horne.  I talked my grandmother into giving me that and it was the starting point for much of my research on her family.  Without it, I would never have known or guessed that she was born in Wilcox County, Alabama which turned out to be key to finding her father's family.  I was also fascinated by her description of her goods (nothing but what she could earn working in the fields). 

So I started off with a family tale that was not true - and even at the time I was pretty sure they were making it up - and with a pension application that may have occasionally fudged the truth but gave me a lot of good useful information.  Both of these hooked me on finding out more about these people, something I've been working on ever since.   My grandmother, on the other hand, never again showed an interest in the topic.  I think that asylum was just too much for her. 

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