Untangling the Twisted Lines

Now that I've finished the collection of Civil War letters of my first cousin, four times removed—Taliaferro Simpson, or "Tally" for short—my next task is to go back through all the notes I've gleaned from the editors' footnotes on family relationships. Just to be sure—one never knows, you see, whether I've missed an ancestor.

For instance, one footnote at the end of the volume, affixed to a letter of condolences from a Captain Henry P. Farrow of the Confederacy's War Department, mentioned that he was "husband of Tally's cousin Cornelia." Off I went to search for all the Cornelias in my family tree database. After all, how many Cornelias could there be?!

As it turned out, more than I cared to slog through, including one false lead on the Broyles side of our family. Tally's mother, you may remember, was sister to my third great-grandmother, Sarah Ann Taliaferro, who married Ozey Robert Broyles. Their daughter, Margaret Cornelia, married Samuel Van Wyck. Not Farrow.

I knew that. Maybe it's pushing capacity to remember all those names in a nineteen thousand person tree.

As for the other Cornelias? None of them seemed to relate to Tally's mother's side of the family. Besides, I have no Farrows in my tree. Must be a connection on the Simpson side.

But there are others. Remember the "Taylor Shop" entries in Tally's letters? I'll be reviewing those notes to see what can be added about another of Tally's aunts on the Taliaferro side. And of course, since the Miller family—another Taliaferro link—was featured so prominently in the book, I'll be reviewing all those notes to glean details for my database there, as well.

And then, there is the discussion of the future of the "Fair Unknown," Miss Fannie Smith. Whether the Charleston refugee shows up in any other documents frequented by genealogists, I'm not sure, but I'll be scouring those resources closely to see what became of her, after those tumultuous war years.

If there is anything remarkable to report of all this review of footnotes, you can be sure I'll mention it this week. After all, footnotes can provide the most valuable leads for research.

When Life Must Go On

With her husband suddenly gone—and so soon after the start of the Civil War—Margaret Broyles Van Wyck faced multiple challenges. Though she had spent her entire childhood in Pendleton, South Carolina, following her husband's graduation from medical school, the young Van Wyck family had settled in Huntsville, Alabama, where Samuel set up his practice.

By the time of the 1860 census, the Van Wyck family included four year old son William, his three year old brother Samuel, two year old Oze, and an infant daughter, listed only as "Babe." Though Vandiver's Traditions and History of Anderson County reported that, when her husband was killed during the war, Margaret was left with "three little children, two boys and one girl," that was not entirely correct. That record, however, may have been in error for another unfortunate reason.

The oldest boy, William, born in 1856, was only seven years of age when he died in 1863. The Vandiver account doesn't mention him at all, though Margaret's daughter—the infant "Babe," likely named after her mother, or perhaps the other Broyles or Taliaferro elders of that same name—was poignantly woven into the passage on her widowed mother.

The little daughter soon followed her father to the grave, carrying a part of the mother's heart with her. Towards little girls Mrs. Van Wyck was always most tender.

Raising her two remaining children, Margaret Van Wyck either felt compelled to constantly be industrious, or to seek a way to provide financially for her family. Vandiver noted that "the young widow took up life as well as she could, and worked for her boys."

"Worked," as it turned out, was a word in that narrative meant most literally. Apparently, by 1881, a General Lewis M. Ayer moved from Barnwell County—original home of my McClellans who were the early settlers I've been researching in north Florida—to set up a school for girls in Anderson County. He called the school The Anderson Female Seminary. Included in the Vandiver history was a listing of all the teachers in the faculty of General Ayer's degree-granting institution, including "Mrs. Margaret Van Wyck, long one of Anderson's most honored citizens."

"Enthusiastic in everything that interested her," Margaret Broyles Van Wyck "impressed her vivid personality" on many of the women whom she taught. The Vandiver history—and its quoted passages in the Ashtabula book—noted that although Margaret lived "to be very old, and almost blind...her cheerfulness, enthusiasm and interest in life never failed."

That was Margaret Broyles Van Wyck's legacy in the community where she returned, after the death of her husband. As for her own family, her two remaining sons, Samuel and Oze, married and raised large families of their own in homes not far from that place of their later childhood.

Perhaps that return home, after the loss of her husband, was the wisest move for Margaret. Indeed, there were several relatives among the friends she had left behind in Pendleton when she and the grandson of her father's good friend and neighbor, Samuel Marverick, had married, back in 1855. Even embedded in her very name was the remembrance of those relatives intertwined not only in her family, but in her community, as well.

Not All Stories Have Happy Endings

The Ashtabula book certainly has served to provide me with delightful stories of my family's history, especially concerning my third great-grandfather, Ozey R. Broyles. Samuel Maverick Van Wyck, grandson of Dr. Ozey Broyles' close friend and neighbor Samuel Maverick, may have made both the Maverick and Broyles families happy when his proposal to Margaret Broyles resulted in uniting the two old friends as family, but that joyous event in 1855 came on the eve of an ominous period of life in the south.

After his wedding, the young Samuel had continued his college education, graduating from the medical department of the University of the City of New York in 1860. By that time, he and Margaret were proud parents of three sons of their own. The family moved to Huntsville, Alabama, where Samuel set up his medical practice.

That arrangement didn't last for long. With the outbreak of war, he served as surgeon for a cavalry unit under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Late in 1861, after enduring his first battle, the young doctor wrote (as reported in Steven M. Stowe's Doctoring the South), "shot and shell fell thick and fast around me, and strange to say I was more collected and calm than when I used to pray in church."

His service as surgeon in the Confederate Army was not to last for long. On the last day of November in that same year, Samuel Maverick Van Wyck was shot and killed. Regardless of which report was the more accurate—one story held that he was killed in action along the Ohio River, while another mentioned that he was murdered by a local Kentucky citizen while riding through Crittenden County alongside Nathan Bedford Forrest—Samuel's bride of six years was now a widow.

When Friends Become Family

Although Dr. Ozey Broyles had become friends with his neighbor, the distinguished Samuel Maverick, the elder man was at least twenty years Ozey's senior. Before 1850, the man was a widower, with his children far from old Pendleton. Still, Samuel Maverick was very much a noted man in his community.

For one thing, he was reputed to be "the richest man in South Carolina," and he struck a distinguished pose whenever he went about in the "dignified and aristocratic town" of Pendleton. One of Ozey Broyles' daughters was asked, years after Mr. Maverick's passing, to pen her remembrances of the man. The Ashtabula book shared excerpts of her letter about him. He "always wore a pale colored coat and broad brimmed low crown whitish hat," as she remembered.

Samuel Maverick, despite his age, had business which regularly took him into town, unwittingly providing a punctilious reminder of the time to all he passed. Sarah, Ozey's daughter, recalled

He rode in a buggy, driving a gray horse, and passed our home every day. The cook told the hour by his passing, so methodical was he, passed at seven, and now it is twelve, because Mr. Maverick is passing to dinner.

Mr. Maverick's only son, Samuel Augustus, had long left for the draw of adventure in Texas—of which he had his fill, having been kidnapped by the Mexicans and put to hard labor before his rescue by his own country's government—and his daughter Lydia had married a successful lawyer in New York City, far from the vaunted Upcountry's innocent glories detailed in Dr. Broyles' letter to his own daughter Margaret.

The elder Samuel Maverick was well into his seventies when he suffered a stroke and ensuing paralysis. Lydia Maverick Van Wyck returned from New York to attend to her father's health and apparently, at least judging by the record in the 1850 census, she did not return alone. Not only her husband but their six children returned with her.

Included in the transplanted Van Wyck family, by that point in 1850, was their oldest son, Samuel Maverick Van Wyck. By then fifteen years of age, he was precisely the same age as the Broyles' oldest daughter, Margaret.

Though shortly after that point, Margaret had moved to attend school in Charleston, perhaps that eclipsed vignette in her youth may have turned out to redirect the course of her life. In a matter of days after Margaret had received the letter from her father instructing her to return to Pendleton, the Broyles' neighbor Samuel Maverick passed away. Having died intestate—incredibly—his son-in-law, William Van Wyck, was appointed administrator of the Maverick estate, further delaying the Van Wyck family's return to New York.

In the interim, the Van Wycks' oldest son, Samuel, was sent to further his education at Amherst College. Though he did not graduate from that particular college, he did continue his education, finishing a course in medicine by 1860.

Somewhere in the midst of all that accomplishment, though, there was a pause to attend to some personal business, for Samuel Maverick Van Wyck, grandson of the Broyles family's beloved neighbor in Pendleton, proposed to Dr. Ozey's oldest daughter, Margaret, and the couple was married in 1855—likely making the respective families of two old "devoted friends" very happy, indeed.