A Genealogy Go Bag

 

My husband, ever the comedian, likes to corral the family—something akin to herding cats—and at the point when we should have left for a trip, quip, "Let's make like a baby and head out."

While it isn't quite as funny now, residents in our area received a message recently, advising much the same thing: park your vehicle in the driveway with the nose facing outward. And pack your go-bag.

Granted, the northern boundary of the wildfire raging nearby is still forty miles removed from us—as the wind blows, I might add—but the prudent heed warnings like that. Yesterday was our moment to make arrangements for what, hopefully, will be an unlikely scenario.

I did a lot of thinking about what might go in a go-bag. After all, my baggage has always included a lot of history. Perhaps that is a luxury of first-world life. Maybe not the kind to make the cut in more dire turns of events. But fire being fire, once it meets history, no matter how old or how irreplaceable, history doesn't win.

One of my husband's Facebook acquaintances happens to be a veterinarian, and, vets being vets, she dearly cares for our fuzzy four-footed companions. She happened to post a recommendation for items to include in this fire season's go-bag. Among her suggestions for preparation were the expected tasks: fill up your gas tank, keep enough of your prescription medications on hand for up to a week's supply, bring bottled water. Food, paper supplies, blankets, clothing. Logical supply choices got rounded out with the ultimate Boy Scout preparedness list of first aid materials, flashlights with extra batteries, and more. And stuff for those beloved pets.

That's when I got to thinking about those other aspects of daily life. Some people care for pets, some engage in what is supposedly America's number one hobby: gardening. But what about those of us who have that other popular hobby? We've amassed a collection of documents, photographs and heirlooms in remembrance of our ancestors. Sure, much of that is now digitized and stored online, but what of the tangible treasures passed down through generations for our safekeeping?

If you had to bolt out your front door at a moment's notice—well, other than that incessant early-warning smoke we've experienced since Wednesday—what else would you bring besides supplies to get you through the next seven days? Would any of it represent your heritage? If you had the time to think things out more clearly before that moment to head out, would something come to mind which absolutely needed to be preserved from past generations?

A hard question to consider, especially realizing the possibility that, upon your return, the legacy bequeathed to you might no longer be available to pass along to the next generation.

On the Way to do Something Else

A funny thing happened on my way to rescue some distant DNA matches I didn't want to lose: I accidentally found some other connections! These small DNA matches are turning out to be useful for far more than one could imagine.

I've never been one to advocate using small DNA matches on the sheer possibility that that limited number of centiMorgans could, in and of itself, yield valuable information. However, I have connected to some useful information by coupling even small matches with other, documentable, evidence.

For the past two days, I've been combing through my distant matches of six to eight centiMorgans and coupling those search results with searches for some of the more rare surnames in my direct line. In the case of my Broyles line, for instance, I have encountered matches with helpful information. This week was no different. As I combed through those DNA matches, honing for surnames, I ran across a snippet from an unpublished manuscript which someone had shared to a tree at Ancestry.com.

Usually, when those documents are re-posted by other subscribers, it is easy to determine who originated the post. In this case, it was provided by a subscriber who had attached it to someone to whom I am not even related. Reading the full page entry, though, I could tell it tangentially referred to someone in my Broyles line—but I couldn't tell for sure, as the entry was cut off before I could ascertain the context.

You know me: I wanted to know more. So, I messaged the subscriber and asked where the manuscript page came from.

Thankfully, I included my direct email address in my message. After all, the newly revised messaging system at Ancestry, in my opinion, is enough to try one's patience; why continue the conversation in the same place?

In less than twenty four hours, not only did I have an answer, but a copy of the entire hand-typed manuscript.

Do I need to mention that I didn't do anything else that afternoon until I had completed reviewing the entire paper?

One thing I realized: this manuscript contained some journal entries which a reader here at A Family Tapestry had already shared with me from a previous typewritten transcription of an ancestor's journal—in that case, gleaned from the library of the South Carolina Genealogical Society.

That made two instances of unpublished manuscripts which contained information that could be useful to me in my own family history pursuits. Obviously, there were people out there who were intent on preserving personal family records; it is just a matter of finding a way to discover those resources.

If nothing else, that experience reminds me of two good intentions I've always had:

• Keep in touch with other people who are researching the same family lines
• Always remember to check for the possibility of unpublished manuscripts or personal papers which have something to do with your surname of interest or that family's community

Sometimes, those helpful connections don't even need to be directly tied to your surname. Remember that FAN Club principle: it is often in mentions of your ancestors by other people that you will find richer context to understand what life was like for your own relatives in prior generations. What their Friends, Associates, and Neighbors said about them reveals much about their life history.

After all, if all we know about our ancestors is just their name and dates of birth and death, we know very little about them, indeed. It's the stories that bring these people back to life. 

The Wuhan Flu Journals

While we are all stuck sheltered in place, time can be heavy on our hands. Those who usually work in an office may be realizing at first how peaceful it is to work from home—and then, a few days later, notice how easy it is to get a lot of work done in so little time. It's a short leap from that discovery to witnessing how slowly the clock drags after all that work is done with still more workday to get through.

For those with young children staying home, the realization hit sooner—perhaps because it is not as peaceful as it would otherwise have been in that haven we call home. Maybe that is why, not far into last Monday's routine, #homeschooling ended up trending on Twitter.

The fact that the fears swirling around us about this year's flu echo those of almost exactly one hundred years ago inspired some family history researchers to suggest we journal our day-to-day experiences as this crisis unfolds. "Imagine what we'd have learned about our ancestors if they kept a diary of their flu experiences," these folks say.

I imagine our ancestors had a little bit much on their hands at that moment.

Still, it's a valid point, and those of us willing to write about such things should consider the opportunity. After all, we may have a long slog of it with continuing "shelter-in-place" orders. Just think: if we do write our daily thoughts about these experiences and manage to keep them organized in one place, and if we keep it up for as many days as this thing takes to unfold, and if we don't chicken out and toss the whole mess after this episode passes, and if—and this is the big one—our children (and then their children and then their children after them) don't neglect to preserve our precious, aging little journal, then our story will make it to touch a generation beyond our own lifespan.

How quaint.

I wonder if more of the attraction of such an idea comes from the therapeutic effect writing itself has upon us. Writing gives us a moment to pause and replay the highlights—or low-lights—of our day, to rehearse the pleasing parts or nurse the hard parts through our memory. If all that therapeutic benefit transforms into a log of our life—if even a small sliver of it—and someone else benefits from it, all the better. But it is likely the chance is as good as if a total stranger from a future age found a message in a bottle washed up on the seashore. A curiosity, at the least.

Certainly, I'm grateful for the letters our family his preserved, and the diaries that have made their way into book form from upheavals such as the many wars our country has faced. They do provide us a glimpse not only into the times of our ancestors, but the character of the people in our families from those past generations. But they wrote not to preserve a historical document of what would someday become important; they wrote because they felt a pressing need to express themselves—in some cases, a desire to connect with others who were important to them.

If there is any need to write in the midst of this crisis, it is in that that we should take pen to paper and preserve our thoughts. There is something therapeutic in that act. And we all know how much we need that balm right now.

The Prescription of Writing

When life begins feeling rudderless, I've found grounding through an old tradition: journaling. Especially with the upheaval of recent family changes, it's been a comfort to preserve thoughts and feelings, no matter how fleeting—not just to record them, but to find the best way to communicate them.

As much as I love having found old letters and diaries related to my ancestors—and as much as I bemoan not having more than just a few slim notebooks of my own mother's scribblings—I have been entirely remiss in not keeping a more regular habit of journaling the thoughts and events in my own life. Assuming there is anyone looking back from their vantage point of the next century, those future great-grandchildren would find precious little to help them piece together the lives of my generation's cohort.

Taking pen in hand and applying those remembrances to paper is far different than blogging one's thoughts in digital format. While it is true that paper does disintegrate over time, online records are as fleeting as the electrical impulses that carry them—and as fickle as the ownership of their dot-com hosts. I've even read one author's musings that the tools we use in our writing influence the style of our output. Consider Hemingway's staccato delivery—both in terseness and manual typewriter production. The fluidity of longhand expression on a writing pad may do more for the psychology resident in the prose than we think.

And so, I find a prescription for writing—the old fashioned way, in my journal—to be a habit I'd be happy to reacquaint myself with at this juncture in life. After all, it seems quite disconcerting to realize that, but for one lone cousin, that generation in our family—and all their memories—is all but gone for good. To be sure, writing about them won't bring them back, but it will go a long way toward enabling the next generation to pass along their remembrance to our family's future generations.

Caution: Footnotes Multiply To-Do Lists

I've long since realized that paying attention to footnotes can provide further reading for someone seeking a richer tapestry concerning their ancestors. Having gone cover to cover on a book, A Faithful Heart, written by and about the friends, associates and neighbors of my Broyles relatives, I may have completed that reading task, but I also come away from the experience with a long to-do list of further reading. Let me catalog some of those future tasks for you here.

There were several Civil War diaries mentioned, among which is one I wish to focus on: A Rebel Came Home: The Diary of Floride Clemson, 1863-1866. Floride Clemson, daughter of Clemson university founder Thomas Green Clemson, lived a few miles from the towns in Anderson County which my Broyles relatives called home. More than that, one of my Taliaferro ancestors' relatives through marriage was instrumental in the establishment of that college, so my family has multiple ties to this woman and (hopefully) her diary.

One early footnote in the Emmala journals mentioned Louise Ayer Vandiver's Traditions and History of Anderson County. Originally published in 1928, according to the FamilySearch wiki for Anderson County, South Carolina, a copy can be had for the subscription price to either Ancestry.com or World Vital Records. However, I've found a searchable resource for this book at Google Books, and, better yet, a browsable version at HathiTrust.

Mentioned in that same footnote in Emmala's journal was reference to another book of interest. According to the footnote, as well as the bibliography, Silas E. Lucas published a book in 1978 through the Southern Historical Press entitled Early Anderson County, S.C., Newspapers, Marriages, Obituaries 1841-1881. That book was mentioned in several footnotes to Emmala's journals. As you can imagine, I'd love to get my hands on a copy of that book, but I couldn't find anything online concerning it—not at Amazon, not through a Google search (other than to provide a link to the footnote in Emmala's journal), not at WorldCat, not even while searching through the book tab at FamilySearch. How could a book so recent as that have vanished so completely? Now my to-do list has to be augmented with the "to-do" of finding the book before I can even read it.

But there are many more resources to tackle in the meantime. Among them are Richard Wright Simpson's History of Old Pendleton District. It can be found in its original 1913 edition at Internet Archive, but I also obtained a print copy of the book, having something to hold in my hand as I read being my preference. Having already obtained it, the only thing left on my to-do list here is to actually, ahem, read it.

And speaking of Richard Wright Simpson, he it is who was one of the two letter-writing Confederate soldiers whose war-years life was laid out in the book, Far, Far From Home: The Wartime Letters of Dick and Tally Simpson, 3rd South Carolina Volunteers. While not directly related to Emmala Reed, whose journals comprised the volume I just finished reading, Dick and Tally were indeed relatives of the oft-mentioned Robert Broyles in her diary. There are so many other volumes mentioned in the Reed journals footnotes and bibliography, but since that, too, is a book I already own, it's high time I begin reading. The other books can wait their turn. 



 

So Much for Plans . . .

If you thought you'd find me, this morning, thoroughly engrossed in the closing chapters of Miss Emmala Reed's journal, A Faithful Heart, you have to realize that was the plan. But it wasn't what actually happened.

Instead of my pleasant morning coffee date with Emmala's journal, I am flat on my back, wracked with a fever. Flu? Seems awful early for such aches and pains.

Seeing this inconvenient agony coming on Sunday afternoon, I gave up and tried to sleep it all off. When sleep evaded me, I grabbed Emmala's book, and finished it.

Spoiler alert: the editor, Robert T. Oliver, provided an epilogue to neatly bundle up the post-war stress of this tiny Anderson, South Carolina, community. While the editor focused his comments on the Reed family specifically—so no further mention of the unfaithful beau Robert Broyles—I do know that Robert married Ella Wilkinson Keith, daughter of Charleston Episcopalian minister Paul Trappier Keith. Apparently, from documents located at Ancestry.com, Robert, like his younger brother and my direct ancestor Thomas Broyles, inherited lands in Washington County, Tennessee, where he eventually passed away in 1894. His father's namesake—his full name being Ozey Robert Broyles—the younger Robert had five children: Sarah, Ella, O.R. junior, Trapier Keith, and Lucy. By the time of his obituary, though, the report maintained he had only four, so I am still in search of death dates for the oldest three; perhaps one predeceased him

The happy news was, according to the epilogue to Emmala's diary, that she did, indeed, find a "faithful heart" to marry. A friend of a friend, Emmala's beau was a merchant from Abbeville, with business concerns in both Charleston and Columbia. Emmala, who by 1867 was serving as a music and literature instructor at a woman's institute, saw their letter-writing courtship develop into an engagement, and she married George William Miller at the end of November, 1867.

That, of course, is not the end of my Broyles and Taliaferro reading in South Carolina. We'll go over the list of resources gleaned from Emmala's journal tomorrow, after I catch up on some sleep!

The End is in Sight . . . Finally!

It's taken me nearly two months—and even then, I can't say I've reached the end. But I've promised myself a coffee date with my book and faithfully kept that date for, well, almost all of those days. Some days, reading just takes longer.

The two months started in early June when, prompted by a suggestion from reader Lisa, who had recommended a book which mentioned some of my ancestors, I actually followed through, ordered the journal and finally started reading. Now, practically two months later, I am within twenty pages of the final sentence in the Reconstruction-era journals of one Emmala Reed of Anderson, South Carolina, A Faithful Heart.

Don't think those twenty pages will breeze by quickly. As Lisa had mentioned to me in conversation over this book, the diarist's entries are hard to read. Emmala Reed wrote in spurts, dashing out phrases about her subject matter, rather than complete sentences. While many of us may speak in that fashion in everyday conversations, having to construct meaning from those phrases, when reading them absent of inflection or pauses, can be confusing; which phrase signifies the end of one thought versus the beginning of the next?

In addition to that unexpected challenge, the editor of the journals, recently-retired history instructor at Coastal Carolina University Robert T. Oliver, provided ample guidance in interpreting not only the steady supply of references to names and incidents, but additional resources for further information through the footnotes on almost every page. Some of the pages were taken up nearly halfway by the footnotes. While I love the many references—you can be sure they are adding to my future reading list—I found myself jumping back and forth between Emmala Reed's journal entries and the footnotes, trying to align the names with the notes.

I might, on some days, sit at my coffee spot for a solid hour of reading, yet barely cover a small section of the book. A twenty page day was a rare event. I finally had to mark the last page with a red flag to give me incentive to keep pushing on.

The constant theme of the journals—basically Emmala Reed's yearlong harangue over her former beau and his abrupt end to their relationship—began to wear on me, as well. It wasn't exactly a gracefully-completed story arc, with any crescendo to a climax, followed by a satisfactory denouement, just the continual drip of commentary about how that unfortunate resolution was immovably a part of her future.

While that theme did wear on me, the pages of her journal treated me to insight on the day to day life of people who turned out to be my relatives—everyone from my third great-grandfather Ozey Broyles, to his disappointment of a son Robert (who incidentally was older brother to my direct line ancestor), to other residents of the town whose names I recognized from my very extended family tree as distant cousins. Robert Oliver's footnotes filled me in on the mesh of relationships and the resources he used to track down further information on each one of those individuals.

Those editorially-provided resources, incidentally, now add to my growing reading list, showing me that it is indeed possible to learn about one's ancestors by immersion in written material about a town, or about a segment of society—like Confederate soldiers from South Carolina, or Reconstruction-era state legislators, or early women of the post-Civil War South. Some of these books I've already purchased and they are awaiting their turn on that growing pile of reading to do; others are, thankfully, available online as public domain territory, saving me a few pennies on that reading budget.

It will take me one more coffee date with Emmala's journals to safely say I've completed the journey. I can't say I've learned much about my second great-grandfather, the younger brother of the jilting Robert Broyles, other than his few cameo appearances as a rather pleasant incidental to the social occasions of that town's history, but I get the distinct impression that the Broyles family as a whole was, in the end, seen through a fairly bitter lens. Of course, I'd love to delve further into whatever behind-the-scenes issues contributed to the rift between the two families—who happened to be relatives, incidentally—and perhaps those reasons will be uncovered by the other recommended resources. But then I need to balance my need to know with a healthy respect for time used versus knowledge to be gleaned by such an investment.

Still, it was interesting to gain a glimpse of the day-to-day life of these relatives, both distant and direct, through the chance rescuing of this set of journals from a garage sale. For me, the time invested in those book-and-coffee getaways was well worth the effort, though I can't say the same for anyone not personally related to the people in the book, other than for curiosity regarding the place or time period. 

Off the Shelf: A Faithful Heart

Finally, finally, I'm opening the cover of the book that includes many mentions of my Broyles ancestors from Anderson County, South Carolina. It's been almost two months since reader Lisa mentioned the title in a comment here. True, it takes a while for books to be ordered and delivered. Then put in line behind other books that need to be read. And, well, cleared from other obligations, conferences, travel plans and...and...and...

I had to make an agreement with myself that if I am ever going to read the books I want to read—meaning, the ones I already own—I will need to make an appointment with myself to work on such a project regularly. As in, every day.

So I make a date with myself to go out for coffee. And bring my book. Sometimes, I also invite my husband to come along; after all, he likewise has a tower of books he really means to read. Or, I'll invite my daughter, now that her teaching schedule has modulated to a dull roar rather than its frenetic full speed jet whine.

The point, of course, is to get some reading done. Isolating a specific spot and a delineated time slot seems to help. And bringing along a book I've been yearning to read is the bonus.

That book, lately, has been A Faithful Heart; The Journals of Emmala Reed, 1865 and 1866. As Lisa has already mentioned, Emmala's journal was full of mentions of the Ozey Broyles family, particularly my third great-grandfather Dr. Ozey's son Robert, whom Emmala considered her childhood sweetheart.

The book's editor, Robert T. Oliver, fills in the many blanks by providing biographical context and historical setting for the Reed journals, for which I am thankful. Not only was Emmala smitten with the young Robert Broyles, but her family was next-door neighbors to the Broyleses. Furthermore, upon realizing the surname of the diarist was Reed, I had wondered whether she was related to the Broyles family through Ozey's mother, whose maiden name was also Reed. (While I am far from finishing the book, I have already uncovered a relationship between the families, but it was not the connection I had assumed it was.)

I particularly value the editorial comments by Robert Oliver, who explained how the journals were found (at a garage sale), why they are so significant historically, and the particular challenges he had to undergo to transcribe them. The rarity of these journals is, in part, owing to the fact that while other diarists concluded their writings at the close of the Civil War, Emmala took up her task at that point, and continued it through the difficult historical period of Reconstruction. Due to the economic pressures increasingly experienced in the south post-war—yet running head-on into the result of that pressure in Emmala's apparent personal need to pour out her anguish on paper—this young woman resolved her dilemma of running out of paper supplies by "cross hatching" her writing. In other words, when she ran out of paper, rather than discontinuing her habit of journaling her daily life, she simply flipped the pages sideways and wrote perpendicularly to her original entries.

As I read through this book, of course the journal entries of Emmala Reed will be most pertinent to my own pursuit of the Broyles family's story. In addition, though, the editorial content will provide a broader perspective to the changing times in that region following the Civil War, something I'm already trying to absorb. Better yet, I've discovered that this book is only one of a series of books called Women's Diaries and Letters of the South, put out by the University of South Carolina Press. Since I'm discovering that the most telling documentation of the social mores of the times seem to be what is revealed in letters and diaries of these very women, I will be perusing the list for other titles to read in this series, as well.

But first, there's a coffee date with a list of books I've promised myself to read. After Emmala's story, there are others...

 
Above: Cover to the book, A Faithful Heart, containing the journals of Emmala Reed. Strangely, though the ISBN on this cover, obtained through Amazon.com, matches the number on my copy of the book, the photos featured on three of the four corners are displayed in reverse of my copy's images. Hopefully, nothing from my copy is omitted from the most up to date copy of this book; I don't want to miss one iota of the details I'm sure to find in Emmala's journals.

Comprehending Context in Genealogy

It's been quite an experience, looking at excerpts from the diaries, memoirs, and letters recording the aftermath of the Civil War. As one reader, Kathy, remarked, "I never learned about these kinds of events in my history classes." True, these details, while huge in the eyes of the people enduring them, represent only a small portion of the wide expanse of both world and even national history, and it is not surprising that we don't often hear reports such as these.

In addition to sheer curiosity over that time period in American history, I had another reason for lingering over these details of the past couple weeks. I would never have discovered them, had I not been in pursuit of the day-to-day history of specific members of my ancestry. Having discovered that my third great-grandparents, Ozey and Sarah Taliaferro Broyles, had at one time lived in a home which is not only still standing, but beautifully restored and serving as a museum, I wanted to know more. Handily, the historic foundation supporting the Ashtabula restoration happened to sell a book—and though it is long out of print, I found a used copy and purchased it.

It seems every little bit we wrestle from the silence of our family history becomes a stepping stone allowing us yet another tiny step forward. The book, once I received it and started reading, turned out to mention several other resources for the local history of Pendleton, South Carolina. One by one, I am assembling a personal library of out-of-print diaries and memoirs of the contemporaries of my third great-grandparents as I find the resources cited in the Ashtabula book.

I am also learning the value of Internet Archive, Hathi Trust, Google Books, Project Gutenberg, and other repositories of free books in the public domain, for that is my first stop when a note in the Ashtabula book gives me the name of such out-of-print volumes. And when it is not a book format I'm seeking, I try for manuscripts at the National Union Catalog of Manuscripts, or entries at state archives, or even putting Google search through its paces to see what can be found. And I learn to read footnotes.

It's these hidden resources from bygone ages—letters, diaries, newspaper entries, unpublished manuscripts, memoirs—that provide the day-to-day details of life in our ancestors' village that bring those forebears to life, even if I can't locate those stodgy old documents which verify their existence. These are the kind of resources which reinforce the mantra about seeking out the "FAN Club"—the friends, associates and neighbors of our ancestors. When our ancestors' neighbor writes the book on "Our Village," who do you think that neighbor will be talking about?

For my part, the daily nitty-gritty of my third great-grandparents' lives which I can't discern from their death certificate—or even from their probate records—I can find in abundance, if I can locate a book or even a letter from that same time period in that same tiny village.

More than that, if I am fortunate enough to uncover such rich resources, I can learn about the turn of events sandwiched in, locally, between the major upheavals in life that we call history. I can learn about the Civil War from the history books. Likewise about Reconstruction. But who knew that there was such angst among my third great-grandparents' neighbors, even before the Reconstruction era officially began and life became so radically different for my southern ancestors? These little vignettes help bring clarity to attitudes held broadly among people from specific regions, and may possibly even explain why people chose to make the changes in their lives that they did. The context provided by these old resources helps us to understand our ancestors, not just recite the dates linked to their major life stages.

Resources like these that we've reviewed in the past couple weeks are among the tools sometimes neglected by family history researchers. Accessing old newspapers often requires a subscription, adding cost, or at least the know-how to seek out the free resources and serendipity to have ancestors living in the very towns where their newspapers subsequently can be accessed for free.

Likewise—perhaps even more challenging—the quest to find hundred-year-old books on local history, particularly of a personal nature like published collections of letters or journals can be off-putting. But the effort to find these items affords us the very peek into our ancestors' lives that we crave. What we can find in these personal treasures are the very glimpses of those people now long gone that put their lives in context for us. With tools like these, we can, indeed, begin to recreate the lives of the men and women peopling the generations of our personal past. 

"Always the Best of Friends"

To find a local history book which was also detailed in its genealogy is a bonus, and the Ashtabula book provided just enough to keep tempting me to turn its pages. Not far into the second chapter came not only a description of my third great grandfather, but also his wife, her three sisters and her father, as well. Apparently, they had been in the community long before Dr. Ozey R. Broyles married Sarah Ann Taliaferro.

Sarah, "one of Zacharias Taliaferro's four lovely daughters," was the oldest, followed by Lucy Hannah, then Margaret, and finally, Caroline. Lucy Hannah had married Col. David Sloan Taylor, staying in Pendleton District for a while in another graceful home, known as Woodburn. Her younger sister, Margaret, married Richard Franklin Simpson, eventually a congressman representing their home state. And the youngest, Caroline, married Dr. Henry Campbell Miller.

It was recalled, in writings by Sarah Taliaferro Broyles' namesake daughter, Sarah Ann Broyles Williams, that "Pendleton seems to have been called old Pendleton even in Ma's youth." Preserved in that 1926 letter by the younger Sarah was the remembrance that, though in South Carolina, the town of Pendleton had been settled by Virginians, including Zachariah Taliaferro. She noted, "his wife was of the Carters and Chews of Virginia."

By the time Zachariah and his bride had settled in South Carolina—their eldest daughter Sarah was born there in 1803—it wasn't long until he had struck up a friendship with one of the Pendleton neighbors we've already met, Samuel Maverick. This was the owner of the plantation known as Montpellier, seen on the 1825 map I shared yesterday.

The man had developed a reputation as a horticulturist, and it was noted that "there were no grounds like his in the whole County." Described as "kind, but particular," the man possessed "piercing eyes and heavy brows," enough details to warrant staying power in the memory of the neighboring children, among them Zachariah Taliaferro's granddaughter, Sarah Ann Broyles Williams, who wrote those words. According to Sarah Williams, her grandfather and Samuel Maverick were "always the best of friends," but during visits to the Maverick property, she was charged "to not step on the flowers or on the borders of his flowers" and, as she was quick to add, "I did walk straight on."

Connections formed even at that early date would, at some point in the future, serve to intertwine some neighbors as even more than the best friends.

"The Most Beautiful Farm in the Up Country"

It wouldn't do to discuss the history of a home without beginning at the beginning of the building's story. Thus, the Ashtabula book—story not only of a building, but of the families who once called it home—set the stage by starting with the early settlers in Pendleton, South Carolina. That brought the story back to one of the "gentlemen of fortune and high respectability from the low-country" who moved his family to Pendleton District in the 1820s. That man was Lewis Ladson Gibbes, whose wife's uncle had been a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Lewis Ladson and Maria Drayton Gibbes brought their eight children to a "small farm surrounded by many acres of forest along the old road from Pendleton to Greenville," as the Ashtabula book's editor, Mary Stevenson, had noted in the second chapter.

Clear clean water flowed from several springs over to the Eighteen Mile Creek. From the hilltops one could see the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains and all the country around.

The vista, as enticing as it may have sounded, was not enough to keep the Gibbes' six sons home on the farm. One by one, each son, reaching adulthood and gaining the education—or sense of adventure—to strike out on his own, left the beautiful farm near Pendleton for more promising futures.

Among the other young men in this exodus from Pendleton was the son of Gibbes' neighbor, Samuel Maverick. His son Gus had left his hometown for the excitement of a young Texas. The elder Samuel Maverick had hoped to entice his son back home and, when hearing that the Gibbes property had been put up for sale in 1837, saw that as his opportunity—but, "all in vain."

Though the elder Samuel Maverick was unable to convince his son to return home, even with the promise of the gift of a lovely farm, another family sprang for the opportunity. John Gibbes, third son of the by-then-deceased Lewis Ladson Gibbes, had put the family farm on the market with the enticing tag line, "the most beautiful farm in the up country." Closing the transaction in the "up country"—the designation South Carolinians sometimes used to designate the parts of the state not along the Atlantic coastal plain (the low country)—in 1837, the Gibbes farm now became the property of Dr. Ozey R. Broyles.

The Broyles family—also large, with eight sons and two daughters—soon filled the home vacated by the descendants of the Gibbes family. Though the Broyles family was at Ashtabula for barely fourteen years, those years were filled with many events, thanks to intertwining connections with others in the community—many of which, thankfully, initiated letters, diary entries, and other preserved  remembrances, and, once I find them, these will inform us more completely of the day-to-day life of those ancestors of mine whose activities once filled the rooms of Ashtabula, the "large house with wide piazzas."

Above: Section of a pen and ink tracing by B. Schelten of a map of Pendleton District, South Carolina, from Robert Mills' Atlas of the State of South Carolina, published in 1825; note Samuel Maverick's property labeled Montpellier on the stage route eastward from Pendleton through Pickensville to Greenville, along which Ashtabula was later built. Map courtesy Geography and Map Division, United States Library of Congress.   

The Switzerland of South Carolina

If a book is designed to contain a potpourri of historic resources, only one of which is the featured attraction of the diary concerning the home of one's ancestors, it would be natural to expect such an eager reader to jump straight to the desired entry. But I resisted the temptation.

Though Clarissa Adger Bowen's diary about her years residing at the Ashtabula Plantation in Pendleton, South Carolina, was the prime reason I bought the 128 page book, hers was only one of several resources included in the volume. To set the stage—as well as bring us up to speed on the history of the location—editor Mary Stevenson included large sections quoted from other material. How could I skip over such mood-setting details as the quote from a book describing an Englishman's visit to the Pendleton District in 1837, or annotated maps describing the principal residences of the region during that time period?

And so, doing my due diligence to absorb the entirety of the Ashtabula book, I resisted the temptation to jump ahead and cut straight to the chase of the Bowen diary. Fortunate that I did, I stumbled upon a two page quote—plus sketch of Pendleton dating from 1823—of material about the area drawn up by Robert Mills. The chapter, at least in the Ashtabula book, was called "The Story of Pendleton, 1755-1823," and was assembled from various of Mills' publications.

Robert Mills, in case the name doesn't ring a bell with you, was—at least at the time of his sketch of Pendleton—the Engineer and Architect of the State of South Carolina. He wasn't, however, there for long. In 1836, Mills won the competition for the design of the Washington Monument which, though only one of several notable buildings he designed, is by far the best known of his works.

In several of his writings, Robert Mills detailed his observations about his visits to Pendleton District, location of Ashtabula, from which we can glean a sense not only of what the place was like, but how someone of his outlook observed it. It was he who, quoted in the Ashtabula book, fashioned the region as "the Switzerland of South Carolina," remarking that "a pure air, cool, translucent water, and all the necessaries of life to be found, are here."

What better way to set local history's stage for the arrival of my ancestors than words like these? How could I skip over such details, just to get to the part I was anticipating? I'd have missed all the stage-setting and ambience. Lights, camera, and action will come soon enough.

Knapp Namesakes

When we explore any family's history, we occasionally run into specific given names which seem to resonate with the family over many generations. In my husband's Stevens line, for instance, it was John for the men in the family. In our Tully line, we have more than our fair share of Margarets.

In the Knapp family we've been studying, it seems there were certain sons named specifically for other relatives. Not unusual, you may agree, but what piques my interest is the story of not only who previously held a particular given name, but what became of him.

In the case of the baby in the picture of the two Knapp boys from Kelso, Washington, young Peter, when he grew up, chose to replace his given name with another. But the name he forsook actually had a significance in the extended Knapp family: it was the name of his uncle—specifically, of one of the Knapp brothers who fought in the American Civil War.

Let's take a moment to get our bearings in the multiple generations of the Knapp family before unfolding the saga of Peter Jones Knapp, the Civil War veteran. My exploration of the Knapp family began when I found a set of photographs which seemed to belong to the William Malphus Knapp family. In addition, the photo of the two Knapp boys in Kelso represented the sons of one of William's brothers, George Harlow Knapp.

William and George were both sons of William Henry Norris Knapp and his wife, Corintha White. Flora Knapp, the young woman whose photo I recently sent home to Texas, was sister to William and George, as well.

Their father, William Henry Norris Knapp, was likely born in Canada, and there was a reason for this. This William's father, John, was born in Canada, following his father Benjamin's possible removal from the colonies during the time of the Revolutionary War. It is possible that this Benjamin Knapp was the one listed in the United Empire Loyalists' Association of Canada database.

However it happened, at least a few of Benjamin Knapp's grandsons made their way back to the United States—William, eventually, to marry Corintha in Indiana; Cornelius, another of William's brothers whom we'll meet later this week, to head west to Kelso, Washington; and Peter to find himself, while visiting his brother William, enlisting for service in the Union Army.

It is mostly from a newspaper report, upon his death, quoting from his own journal that we know such vivid descriptions of Peter Jones Knapp's Civil War experiences. And that newspaper report was summarized in the Find A Grave memorial for Peter Jones Knapp, put up by the Knapp family researcher who has, by now, received the photo of the baby Peter (Jackson) Knapp, namesake of the uncle we are discussing. How else would I know that he was up in the rain at two in the morning when it was "darker than a stack of black cats," preparing for the march just before the Battle of Iuka—or that over sixty percent of his regiment were either killed or wounded, more than any other regiment had lost in any one battle in that war? The Find A Grave memorial included this information from the original article, published in the Kelsonian on April 16, 1924, upon Peter Jones Knapp's death.

That newspaper article, serving also as obituary for Peter Knapp, noted that the soldier's remains were buried at the Portland Crematorium—one detail, as the Knapp family researcher eventually discovered, which was not entirely correct. And that, as we'll see tomorrow, is how Peter Jones Knapp became the last of all the Civil War veterans to be finally laid to rest.   

 

The Closer It Gets, The Harder It is to Talk About It

From a distance, genealogy seems to be the study of those old, dry details of relatives long forgotten—or never known at all. Thanks to that perception, it comes quite easily to search through what would otherwise be considered macabre details—when and how they died, where they were buried, what they left behind to be catalogued in their will.

As we get closer to the ones we knew, personally, the tone seems to soften—to become almost fragile—as memories are dredged up from their submerged resting places. Perhaps it is frightening to re-open the lid on recollections kept far away because of their potential to hurt.

And yet, it is likely those to whom we owe the most, the ones who invested in our own lives.

Perhaps that is why reawakening those memories can hurt so much.

There are lots of unfinished projects in my files with my mother's name on them. I went out of my way to secure a copy of her journal after her passing years ago, and yet, do I have that transcription project completed? Of course not.

I had wanted—with a treatment much as I have done for others' stories here at A Family Tapestry—to tell my mother's story, but the closeness got in the way. In some ways plain as a housewife's resume, in other ways as enticing as an actress' lifestyle, hers was a different path.

It was always different, no matter what stage of her life. Born on a farm in Iowa, she wasn't the child of farmers, nor a descendant of Iowans. When childhood was supposed to be filled with all the comfort and stability of home and friendships and family, hers was a desperate journey through America's Great Depression—sometimes following, sometimes staying back and awaiting a paycheck from, her determined father, always steadfast to his resolve to support his family, come what may.

From her mother, long after her passing, it was the saved newspaper clippings which told me the details of my mother's decision, after high school graduation, to leave home and seek her fortune as an actress in the great city of New York. Photographs from my mother's own albums witnessed the story unfolding—up until the day, that is, when she chose to tell a certain someone, "I do." With that exchange of vows came the trading in of a glamorous night life in the city for the mundane details of life in suburbia. A home of her own. A family. And, eventually, a new career.

Some people can never stand still. What to others might be the end goal becomes to others merely the dressing room for their next starring role. Back when people didn't do such things, my mother decided to enroll in classes at the local community college. She took philosophy. She took German. She studied French. She majored in English. And moved on: A.A., B.A., M.A. And then, accepted into a doctoral program, when...

Things never stay the same. At least, that is how it seems. The rhythm of daily life—by then, having become the sequence of studies, exams, repeat—was once again upset by an unexpected turn of events. With my father's passing, everything seemingly came to a halt. The studies were discontinued—the hope of inserting the term "temporarily" eventually gave way to the reality of "permanently"—replaced by the prospect of simultaneously selling the house and finding a job.

That old, continual pilgrimage to seek employment from a generation past reared its spectral visage as my mother sought work across the country—from New York to California to Minnesota. And then, finally settled in the place she once knew as home: Columbus, Ohio.

Even a return home didn't guarantee the journey was over. As I look back on it now, it seems my mother lived an entirely new lifetime in that city, fulfilling various roles throughout the more than two decades since her return there. It became like a second home to us, her children—not only through memories of our own childhood in visiting our grandparents, but again with her return, as we brought our own families there to visit.

Somehow, buried in all the details of an ever-changing life full of goals and duties and detours, perhaps I missed something in the narrative. Only in retrospect can we sometimes realize the lessons learned from the blur of events which once rushed past our eyes with disorienting speed. I sit down now at my computer to transcribe a page from her journal, witnessing the thoughts she captured more than twenty years ago, and begin to have thoughts of my own. Not just along the lines of "What did all this mean to her?" or "How did she feel about what she was going through?" but "What does this mean to me?" What can I learn from what she learned?

In burying those memories during the times in which their recollection was too raw, too painful, we sometimes neglect to return and revisit them from a safer distance when the time is right. Perhaps this is an inner voice prompting me to plan on making that return trip. The journal is still there, the transcription task still unfinished. From a distance safe enough to heed the call, it would certainly yield me the advantage of a useful message.

 

Got Taxes?

Today is one of those days Americans love to hate: Income Tax Day.

No matter which country you reside in—or which country your ancestors hailed from—if you pay taxes, you likely descend from a long line of taxpaying grumblers. You are in good company.

Here in the U.S., our income tax paying roots would have stretched back to the War of 1812—but for the fact that politics being politics, the tax, proposed in 1814, couldn’t get itself implemented before the end of hostilities in 1815.

Wars and taxes seem to have gone hand in hand, however, for by the time of the American Civil War, Congress introduced what was to become the country’s first personal income tax. It was, however, not to be long-lived, for it was repealed and replaced by a different wartime income tax in the subsequent year.

The first peacetime income tax in American history didn’t arise until 1894. If your roots included those fortunate enough to earn at least $4000 for the year, your ancestors would have had to pay two percent on that amount. Not to worry, though: incomes of that level were only achieved by less than ten percent of American households of the time.

I suspect my husband’s great grandfather, Chicagoan John Tully, was not among those fortunate few. Though he likely was pleased to be more financially successful than he would have been, had his Irish parents chosen to leave him in the County Tipperary townland of his birth, he still showed signs of great concern over his financial status—and, regarding which, what the government considered their rightful claim.

How do I know this? He left his records of tax payments among his most important papers—which, of course, meant his record-hording daughter Agnes Tully Stevens felt it her duty to carefully store those records for future years, just in case. Which meant her son Edward accepted the responsibility of preserving them for…for…well, who knows what. But when Uncle Ed passed away, who should the family think would be the appropriate person to step into the role of family records archivist? Why, the gal who peppered Uncle Ed with all those genealogy questions, of course!

When I look at the pages of those old tax records—receipts from April 23, 1889, for example—I can’t help but see John Tully’s taxpaying ledger from the perspective of the tax history timeline of our nation. While he certainly wasn’t eligible to be taxed at the national level at that time—and by the time the Federal Income Tax, as we know it, was instituted in 1913, he was long gone—he did, however, have to pay his due to local taxing authorities.

Being almost a civil servant, having served in the South Park police force of the era (before it became part of the Chicago Police Department), John Tully faced a two-edged sword: what he hated paying for in taxes, he most certainly needed as salary to meet his family’s own financial needs.

Perhaps his concern over such taxing matters was inherited by his daughter, Agnes. Maybe that is why, preserved among that stash of tax receipts, was a chart illustrating the ubiquitous “Where Your Tax Dollars are Spent” topic fielded by most local governmental entities. This must have been quite important to them—or maybe no one knew to throw it out, after Agnes died. For what it’s worth, I know—and now, you do, too—how the City of Chicago spent its residents’ hard earned money in 1917.

Taxes couldn’t have been too outrageous, however, judging from a historical perspective. Though John Tully was no longer there to pay such rates, by the time federal income taxes were implemented, the top rate was only seven percent—on incomes above five hundred thousand. In case you’re wondering, that would be well over ten million in today’s money.

An interesting set of charts at Wikipedia delineates the history of federal income tax rates—and then adjusts them for inflation—in case you are curious about what your American ancestors did have to pay. Handily, the chart extends to the year 2010, giving us a bird’s eye view of how much the government could “feel your pain” in any given year. It certainly shows which years were designed to “stick it to the rich”—the war years of 1941-1946 and again in 1964-1965—and which ones really did deliver the “taxpayer relief” various Acts purported to provide.

Still, history buff that I am, there is nothing about April 15 over which to be enamored. While we history types like to imagine simpler days of the past, those tax woes used to stress out our forebears just as much as they do us. And though we can take heart that, after the close of financial reporting for Fiscal Year 2014 today there will come an April 16, we can’t help but realize it’s but the first day of the rest of a new taxpaying year.

Oh, The Places Where Our Ancestors Hide

It’s all well and good to say you can, as a genealogical researcher, go to historic newspaper archives to find references on your illustrious ancestors, but what of the ones who weren’t world class citizens?

Admittedly, turning to the Library of Congress’ NUCMC catalog won’t suit your taste, if your ancestors were pioneer settlers on the prairie. Nor will a paper chase through the archives of any university holdings or governmental repositories. We just have to face the fact that some of our ancestors were near-anonymous commoners who lived out their days, hoping to grow enough or make enough to cover for their daily bread.

Still, I say there is hope in finding something of record. When that means more “hope” than “finding,” these are times when we need to think, “crowdsourcing.”

I’ll tell you why I say that. Remember my Tully family—one of the Irish immigrant families I’ve been researching in preparation for our trip to Ireland last October? One of the Tully daughters, shortly after fleeing the famine, settled in Ontario (Canada West) and thereafter was married to a man by the name of Edward Ryan. For whatever reason, the couple chose to head further west, and, rather than settle in Chicago as had her siblings, they continued beyond that point. For a while, they lived in Winnipeg. Then they tried their hand at farming, claiming a land grant in the Dakota Territory. After what must have been a horrendous bout with influenza or another ravaging disease, what was left of the families in their party chose to return to Canada. But some stayed in the Dakotas.

You know me: I’m not satisfied to only pursue my ancestral line. I want to know what happened to all the siblings. And their descendants. So I pursued the lines of each of their children—the ones who survived the illness that swept through the family’s settlement.

Other than land records, thanks to the Bureau of Land Management, there would not be many documents to grant me a peek into what made up the daily life of these settlers. Or at least, that’s what I assumed.

At that time, however, I was still actively pursuing the genealogy forums, asking questions about resources that the locals might be aware of, but which would not usually be known by those not living in the area. Thankfully, several respondents to my queries helped me find archives tucked away in university holdings that I would otherwise never know about. This happened both in North Dakota and back in Canada, where some of the family migrated to the western provinces of Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. It would otherwise have taken more search prowess than I possess to have flushed out these resource diamonds in the rough. But that’s the power of crowdsourcing our research solutions.

Granted, there are those ancestors out there who never owned land, never died and passed along their property and possessions by official means of wills, never wrote letters, never were part of family photographs, and maybe never even lived near a town or went to a church that published those folksy gossip columns about who was coming to town, or what the neighbors were up to. I can relate to that quandary—after bemoaning the lack of documentation during our research trip to Ireland in search of pre-1849 records of our Irish ancestors, I winced to read Black Raven Genealogy’s blog post on how Dara relied on a collection of dog licenses to find any record of one of her relatives. Now, that’s desperate. But ingenious. We can take a lesson from those like our fellow genealogy researchers in Ireland and learn to be resourceful in our research approaches.

There are other forms of research crowdsourcing. Unlike the organized approach of queries on genealogical forums, these are more scattered, requiring more perseverance to flush them out of hiding. Or reminders that they are there. Take the GenWeb system, for instance. Most of us (especially in the United States) remember that old resource, organized by nations, states, and eventually counties. Unwieldy to navigate, unpredictable in how much—if anything—can be found in any one given domain, the GenWeb sites may hold just what you are looking for. You will never know, though, unless you pay them a visit and take a look around. Volunteer driven, the site resources are as eclectic as the people who contributed to building the site.

Other resources are entirely locally based. You may have to ask many questions before you discover a promising local repository that could hold the details on your specific ancestor. Try contacting the county historical society or genealogical society for any resources on finding your ancestors. Some county collections—either at these societies or at the local library—may not be shared as part of a larger system. I know that is true in the county where I live. For some reason, our newspaper collections have not been included in the holdings of large online archives such as GenealogyBank or NewspaperArchive. Sometimes, the only way to inquire about such collections is to go straight to the source: the county in question.

People often seem to be happy to share what they know about local resources. Sometimes, the leads I’ve found, just by asking questions or getting on mailing lists, have been enormously helpful. Consider the Perry County, Ohio, website put up by a lone volunteer on his own dime, because he felt it was the thing to do. For those researching the same location, those discoveries are indeed gems.

One other form of crowdsourcing resources is one I hope to see more of. That is the volunteer who sees resources that would be useful for research, but which are tucked away in unknown corners where they would be of use to no one. These are the people who stumble upon photographs or journals of the strangers of bygone years, tucked in a corner of an antique store, and devise a way to let the rest of the world know about them. “Far Side of Fifty” launched one such project for “orphan photographs” back in 2009, and shares one photograph a day in hopes of reuniting photo with family. So far, she’s posted nearly two thousand photographs. Out of those, over one hundred have already found their way home.

Far Side is not alone in this task. If you want to know of others bringing old photographs to light, Far Side keeps a hyperlinked list of other blogs doing the same thing.

What I have yet to find is a blogger who is sharing old journals. While some bloggers will transcribe a family member’s journal and post it for others to read, it is a rare thing to run across someone doing so for a non-relative. Think of all the historic references that could be tucked away in such diaries. A few years ago, archivist Melissa Mannon blogged about finding one such diary, which launched her into the project of transcribing it.

Of course, as wonderful as all that sounds, as the photograph or writing of a mere stranger, it is only of academic interest. What would make me perk up and get really enthused would be if someone walked into an antique store and found a photograph, a journal, a letter, or some other keepsake from one of the ancestors in my family tree.

Now, isn’t that what we’d all love to find?!

Perhaps it is each other we should be looking to, when we wish to find those traces our ancestors have left behind.

A Legacy of Two Families

And at this writing the fruits [of] the marriage are two smart promising boys.

One has to wonder about the legacy left by someone like Charles Edward Broyles. I’m not thinking of his Civil War involvement, or even the track record of his lengthy career in law and public service. I’m referring to the heritage he passed down to each of two entirely separate families—the one he left behind in Georgia, and the one he raised up in his new life in Colorado.

It was a plaintive comment found in a genealogy forum that gave me pause to consider. A descendant—apparently from the second family—noted,

Members of his second family have always been interested in his first family. We have wondered why none of them came to be with the Colonel.

When Charles E. Broyles wrote his brief journal, he had dated the last segment as September 11, 1887. At that point, according to his comment, he and his second wife, Nellie, had two sons. By the time of the 1900 census—which turned out to be six years shy of Charles’ own passing—the couple had six children listed, including one four month old son who had yet to be named.

That 1900 census, though, also revealed that Nellie had been mother of eight children in total. Likely, of the two sons Charles had referred to in his memoirs, one of them was Nellie’s first born, Prentis Bay Broyles. Born February 6, 1885, the child lived only seven years, dying in September of 1892.

Another child—one of only two daughters born to this couple—also died young. Ruby Broyles, born January 18, 1891, died as an infant only eight days later. (It’s a haunting experience for me to read that name, for at the other end of that same decades, Charles’ niece Sarah Broyles McClellan gave her own daughter—my grandmother—that same name: Rubie Broyles McClellan. Could she have known about her estranged uncle’s loss only a few years prior?)

But what of the rest of the children—the ones who survived to adulthood? Who were they, and how did they fare?

The second of those “smart promising boys” was likely Taliaferro Brooks Broyles. Born in 1887, Taliaferro—who evidently caved and forsook the written form of its spelling for its phonetic rendering, Virginia-style, and signed his name as “Toliver”—spent his life as a farmer in the same county in which he was born. He and his wife, the former Minnie Hartley, raised eight children of their own.

Many of the rest of this Broyles family followed suit—working in the same county in which they were born, many earning their living in agriculture. The Find A Grave entries for Conejos County, Colorado, reveal a host of Broyles descendants who spent an entire lifetime in the same place Charles adopted as his new hometown.

Charles and Nellie’s third child presented me with a puzzle. Choosing to name this son after the father—Charles Edward Broyles—created the awkward situation of the father having a son from each of his two marriages given the exact same name. The son Charles from the second marriage—who also spent his adult years in the same county in which he was born, working in livestock and “managing” sheep—likewise chose to call his own son that very same name. Years later, that son, also a lifelong resident of Conejos County, Colorado, chose to name his son Charles Edward Broyles, as well.

No matter how intriguing the rest of the names bestowed upon Charles’ second family—including Flavius Onderdonk Broyles, who understandably chose to go with “Fla” as his nickname—my mind was arrested, once I encountered this obvious duplication.

I couldn’t help wonder what the first son Charles Edward Broyles was thinking about his father, once he discovered this fact. Yes, the litany of names did continue with the more neutral choices of John Aaron for the next son, and a predictable Nellie for the only surviving daughter. But even the last choice of names—for that son who had been left unnamed for four months leading up to the 1900 census—made me wonder: Dryden Johnson Broyles. I can guess that Onderdonk might have come from Charles’ second wife’s side of the family. But Johnson? That was first wife Lucy’s maiden name. And even that plain choice of John Aaron uncomfortably echoed the John A. Broyles left behind as youngest son to Charles and Lucy.

Seeing all these names echoed from first family to second one, I couldn’t help recalling Charles’ own enigmatic comment:

And now four boys and two girls are left in Georgia as the fruit of our marriage. I am ashamed of none of them, yet might have been made to feel prouder.

What was the legacy left behind for that first family?

Meanwhile, Back in Colorado

Perhaps Charles Broyles can be excused for not recalling the moment of his wife’s November 28, 1880, death. After all, he was in Colorado, while she passed away in their residence back in Dalton, Georgia—a trifling matter of fourteen hundred miles between them at the time. I imagine news, back then, could travel slowly.

We can be sure, though, that he received the news well before the next event he documented in his journal.

In October 1882 while at San Luis Court I met Miss Nellie Armstrong, a highly respectable young woman, and fell in love with her. My love increased as I knew her the more and it was reciprocated and in April 1884 we were married at San Acacio, Costilla Co. Colorado. She was from Indiana and an intelligent highly esteemed lady. And at this writing the fruits the marriage are two smart promising boys.

Perhaps we can’t fault Charles for a few other not-quite-accurate details in this account. After all, according to Charles’ marriage record, at the time he married Miss Nellie Armstrong, he was fifty five—while she was twenty four.

Well, actually, I should point out that Charles claimed he was fifty five. On May 7, 1884—the actual date in which they stood before the Justice of the Peace in Conejos County—Charles would have been fifty eight years of age.

So, perhaps by the time he was writing his memoirs, his memory was beginning to lose its youthful vigor.

The question remains: who was this young woman who caught Charles’ attention? According to a story given by Dryden Johnson Broyles, Charles’ and Nellie’s youngest son, to Montague Laffitte Boyd, compiler of the Broyles genealogy published in 1959, Nellie was born in Brooksburg, Indiana, on November 19, 1860. (Brooksburg, incidentally, had been founded by her maternal grandfather.)

According to the author, Dryden had told him,

She came to Colorado with two of her brothers, Charles and John Armstrong. They intended to homestead land in the San Luis Valley, but the land they wanted was under Spanish Grant.... Her brothers then went West and she got a job teaching school in the Spanish town of San Luis…. She was the first English speaking teacher in that town.

All told, Charles and Nellie had eight children of their own—six sons and two daughters. Seven of those children survived to adulthood, including one son whom Charles chose, inexplicably—awkwardly—to name Charles Edward Broyles. Keeping in mind that his own firstborn with first wife Lucy was also named Charles Edward Broyles, this beckons us to once again attempt reading through that nether land embedded between the lines of his journal. While he was quite pleased with himself to announce, “And at this writing the fruits of the marriage are two smart promising boys,” he had not represented his first family in such glowing terms.

In recapping—as you’ll no doubt remember—his marriage to Lucy, he had added one more assessment to that episode, which I had previously left out of his narrative. Returning to pick up the rest of Charles’ original statement there, it makes me wonder just why he could boast so proudly about his second family, while not sharing that sentiment regarding the children of the first wife he had so greatly revered.

And now four boys and two girls are left in Georgia as the fruit of our marriage. I am ashamed of none of them, yet might have been made to feel prouder.

Reflections, From a Distance

With such an abrupt departure on the part of Charles Edward Broyles, leaving home and family in Dalton, Georgia, for the Colorado Territory, you may be wondering how things were going for his wife Lucy and their seven children after his exit. Of course, we have no records available to discern what may have unfolded in the five years leading up to the next census in 1880—after all, who documents gossip?—but by then, it is clear that Charles had remained in Colorado while Lucy and some of her children still maintained a household in Dalton.

It was difficult, at first, to discern any signs of just how this husband and wife parted in 1875. Partly owing to the more flowery language of the times, partly owing to Charles’ circular approach to unfolding his life story in his brief journal, I wasn’t sure at first whether the two had parted on amicable terms.

You may remember I had shared a portion of Charles’ description of meeting and marrying his wife, along with his glowing statements about her character. We need to revisit those comments now—and, for those of you who didn’t take the opportunity to read ahead from the transcription of his full statement, to pick up the rest of his narrative. You see, in order to help myself piece together the story, I had omitted some of the details. We need to review them now, to try and fill in the blanks where Charles’ narrative left me with questions.

If you recall, Charles had explained,

I married Miss Lucy A. Johnson of Barnwell, S. C. and lived together some thirty years…

What the entire sentence actually continued to say—and I’ll leave in the full detail of his choice of words here—was:

I married Miss Lucy A. Johnson of Barnwell, S. C. and lived together some thirty years and was finally divorced by Gods inerorable law. This occurred in 1881 while I was in Colorado and had been since March 1875.

Divorced? I thought nary a whisper was mentioned about the “D” word, back in that era. I decided to take that rendition in a more poetic sense, and was rewarded for my patience in seeking more explanation later in the text.

Then we parted as others with fond hope of meeting. But not so we never met again. And now four boys and two girls are left in Georgia as the fruit of our marriage.

As if feeling a twinge of guilt for leaving her for so long, Charles then added his defense (which I’ll include with word choices as he gave them):

I had not seen her for years as I was anxious to make a property before going back that would make her and children conforable and happy.

So, as he represented himself in his autobiographical notes, his intention was to strike it rich succeed in his endeavors to the extent of being able to return to Georgia, sweep his wife off her feet and have her, delightedly, return with him to his new life in the outback of Colorado.

Just in case a casual reader (such as we are, reading his private notes now, over one hundred years later) might misunderstand what he was saying, he affixed a more plainspoken recap of what happened:

In November 1881 my wife died at her home in Georgia. … I was thus deprived of that hope and as noble a woman as ever lived on this earth.

This may very well have been what happened—or at least what Charles dreamed would happen. With only one minor detail—Lucy died in 1880, not 1881—documentation seems to bear that out. (Well, at least the part about his wife dying before he could return home—as if he ever would have actually returned to Georgia, considering the circumstances in which he had departed.)

Meanwhile, another flowery composition gives us a picture of what was happening on the Georgia side of this drama’s stage, in the form of an obituary published in the North Georgia Citizen on December 2, 1880.

Death of an Estimable Lady.

            Death is a stern and impartial visitor, coming when we least expect, and bearing our loved and dearest from our sight.

            The many and warm friends of Mrs. Lucy Broyles were shocked to hear of her death, which sad event took place on Sunday morning, Nov. 28, at her home, the residence of Maj. C. E. Broyles. Mrs. Broyles was a native of Barnwell, S. C. Perhaps many of her old friends there remember her, as she appeared in her lovely girlhood, when Miss Lucy Johnson.

            Mrs. B. had resided in Dalton for many years, winning friends wherever she went by the sweetness of her disposition, her refined manners and sprightly and intelligent conversation. She was universally beloved. The poor, the sick and the afflicted have lost in her a warm friend and sympathizer, and her children, that she so fondly loved, the best of mothers. Indeed she was the very sunlight of their existence—her smiles, her love, her kind advice and tender counsels, made their home the abiding place of perfect love and peace.

            But she has gone. Her pure spirit has taken its flight to the heavenly land, and those who loved her so dearly have nothing to comfort them, in their sore bereavement, but the knowledge that she rests in peace, and the hope of meeting her in the eternal world. Her last words gave evidence of a bright and shining faith.

            When her eldest son (summoned from Atlanta to her dying bed) arrived and bent over her with the words, “O! mother this is a bitter cup for me,” she opened her eyes, lustrous with love and hope, and faintly murmured, “Yes, bitter now—but sweet in the hereafter for me.” Then with other half uttered words of love for “her boy” and her other loved ones, she sank into unconsciousness and finally into the last and eternal sleep.

At the time of her passing, Lucy Ann Johnson Broyles was three months shy of fifty years of age.

Ensuing Difficulties

…on the 22^nd day of March 1875, I left Georgia for the Territory of Colorado.

Ever since I discovered the journal of Charles Edward Broyles, older brother of my second great grandfather, I was puzzled by his apparently abrupt departure. Supposedly established in a prominent position in his community, Charles left career as well as home and family for the unknown possibilities of life alone in an outpost of the nation’s territorial claims.

The only possible reason for his decision to leave, as mentioned in his journal, might have been extrapolated from his comments about trying to set up his sons in business. One wonders whether he sold out at a loss. But would that have been enough to tip the scales in favor of vacating an entire life established in a community?

I cast about, searching for clues as to why Charles might have left. After all, though journals may be perceived as “tell all” documents, they often leave out significant segments of the rest of the story. One entry in a genealogy forum suggested a reason for his hasty departure: that, after the war, he had lost his plantation. Remembering Charles’ entry in the 1870 census where his real estate was valued at a comfortable amount yet his personal property was comparatively less than that of his neighbors, I considered that a possibility. After all, Charles had been a loyal player, when it came to giving his all to the Confederate cause. He did mention returning home, after the war, “poor, moneyless and…half clothed.”

To see if anything further could be gleaned from documentation, I went fishing on the various newspaper archives with holdings from the state of Georgia. Historic newspapers are always a wonderful resource—well, if you can locate any articles mentioning your specific ancestors, that is—for third party reports and (supposedly) impartial viewpoints. Thanks both to several holdings for the state of Georgia at GenealogyBank and for the local newspapers’ habit of sharing what other city papers in the state had already reported, news on Charles Edward Broyles was often repeated from his residence in Dalton in publications from several other Georgia cities.

During the difficult period of Reconstruction, when factions within the Republican party were bitterly opposing each other, Charles’ circumstances may well have become an unintended casualty of the disputes. One report, reprinted in the Macon Weekly Telegraph on an unlucky Friday the thirteenth for Charles—May 13, 1870—was attributed to the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, reporting from Dalton.

Portrayed by the editor as a tale “of a late Radical row, at Dalton,” it made gloating reference in those editorial comments to the Radical Republican faction, though the body of the report gave no such indication. Further, it was unclear from the proceedings whether Charles was considered part of the Radical faction, or one of those opposing it.

Regardless, things did not turn out well for Charles in either the proceedings or the outcome.

            Some little belligerent excitement has taken place for a day or two.

            Last term of the Superior Court, Harris and Agent Baker, of the State Road, were indicted for gambling. The cases were taken up by ex-officio Justice of the Peace, Col. Glenn, and the parties were fined. Judge Parrott refused to submit to this change of jurisdiction, and retained the cases on the Superior Court docket. The grand jury of the present court seemed to think that the Solicitor-General, Colonel C. E. Broyles, has not pushed these cases with proper vigilance, and in their presentments they reproved him. Mr. N. P. Harbin, a prominent Republican, was on the grand jury, and it is understood that the Solicitor ascribed the reproof to him, whereupon he sought to hold him to accountability and a difficulty ensued. The parties were separated.

            The Solicitor was tried before Col Glenn this morning, and fined two hundred dollars.

            The whole difficulty has been between Republicans.

While an unfortunate occurrence for Charles, it hardly seemed enough to be the last straw that would cause him to ditch it all and leave town. Yet, all other mentions of his name in the newspaper were routine listings of court cases and outcomes. Charles served out the remaining two years of his term as Solicitor General without any further outbreaks that I could find.

That rather unprofessional comportment, however, may have been our forewarning of trouble to come. By Friday, March 5, 1875—interestingly enough, only seventeen days before the date Charles specifically recorded as the point at which he left Dalton—the Marietta, Georgia, Journal came up with this brief report:

Homicide at Dalton.—We learn that a homicide occurred in Dalton on Saturday. Mr. C. E. Broyles, once Solicitor General of the Cherokee Circuit, is said to have attacked, while under the influence of liquor, without provocation, a crippled man named Davis, and stabbed him so severely that he died Sunday. Broyles was arrested and held to bail in the sum of $500 to answer the charge of stabbing.

Could it be? I checked every detail. Yes, it was Dalton. Yes, he was once Solicitor General. True, the paper didn’t label him as “Col.” Broyles, as reports often fashioned him. But while this entry included only his initials, rather than his name, everything else seemed unmistakably to point the finger at our Charles.

With everything else in his life seemingly spiraling out of place—loss of a war for which he had contributed not only his means but his devoted service, possible loss of property, loss of professional face, perhaps loss of respect of his own sons—perhaps this was the last episode that spurred him on to desperate action.

As the wheels of justice may grind slowly, I have my doubts that a decision on that unfortunate case was reached before Charles left town on March 22. While it may have been in a drunken stupor that he stumbled into this difficulty, it was assuredly with eyes wide open that he abruptly left it, three weeks later.