Where's the Gold?

As we trace the personal history of our ancestors, we can't help but include the broader impact of general history in what became of our own family members. Thus it was with my third great-grandparents, Ozey and Sarah Broyles, after their move from the bucolic Ashtabula outside Pendleton, South Carolina, and into town in nearby Anderson. Even so, the broad sweep of general history may rehearse the major victories of battles, yet miss the personal agonies suffered by our ancestors. This is what makes those private collections of letters, diaries, and other remembrances so valuable for a genealogist.

The Broyles family had moved from Ashtabula in 1851, the lovely home which eventually was purchased by the Adger family. By the time of the Civil War, the Broyles family had long been settled in their new home in town in Anderson, and had seen some of their sons go off to war. Clarissa Adger Bowen, still in her family's home back near Pendleton, felt the need to record her thoughts, prompted by some of the troubling occurrences at the close of the war. The resulting diary is what comprises the remainder of the Ashtabula book which has been of such benefit to me as I piece together the life stories of my ancestors.

Before we get into the body of Clarissa Adger Bowen's journal, some background information is necessary. In review, let's reconstruct the timeline of the closing moments of the Civil War, to help understand the impetus behind subsequent post-war events near home.

First, as you'll remember, one by one, the southern states seceded from the Union, and, by February of 1861, representatives of these states met at the Montgomery Convention in Alabama, to discuss establishment of their new government. In those initiating actions, all federal property was seized, including the holdings—yes, even the gold—at the former federal mints in Charlotte, Dahlonega, and New Orleans.

Soon after that, the Confederate capital was moved from Montgomery to Richmond, Virginia. Then came the long and bitter war between the states. By mid-June in 1864, Union forces began what eventually became known as the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign by its close, nine months later. The trench warfare of that campaign resulted in construction of over thirty miles of trench lines from Petersburg to Richmond. Combined with incessant raids and battles, the prolonged effort eventually led to southern General Robert E. Lee's retreat, and the ensuing Battle of Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. That afternoon, Lee's surrender marked the official end of the Civil War.

Of course, news traveling at a much slower rate in that era than our own times, that surrender was not universally recognized. It took the remainder of the month of April and into the subsequent month for the various generals of the South to get the message. In the midst of all that, the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, and his death the next day, only served to complicate the process.

Meanwhile, just prior to the fall of Richmond, on April 3, Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Cabinet escaped to Danville, Virginia, leaving there for Greensboro, North Carolina, upon receiving news on April 12 of Lee's surrender just three days earlier. With Lincoln's murder, the President's successor, Andrew Johnson, blamed Davis for being complicit in the assassination plot and issued a $100,000 reward for his capture.

This served to spur on Union forces in their search for the escaped Jefferson Davis and the members of his government. However, there was a second chase instigated, as well. Along with the fleeing Confederate personnel leaving Richmond, there was a second train southward bound. This one held some records of the fallen government, as well as Davis' personal belongings. But there was one other detail which caused much speculation: where was all the gold?

The capture of Jefferson Davis himself might have brought a clever Union man a reward of $100,000—no small amount in those days—but to intercept the supposed stash of Confederate gold would bring a much greater premium than that. Reports of the value of that gold, as it turned out, were far more inflated than the inflation rate suffered by the South in the midst of their Confederate economic woes. But at the moment when it was the prime mission of so many Union officers after the official close of the war, the heat was on to find gold—any gold.

The target of this search frenzy, as it turned out, centered on the very vicinity in which the Broyles family and their beloved neighbors had lived, the peaceful country setting just outside Pendleton.

   

Provenance

For those interested in history and the objects that tell its story, the idea of provenance—tracing the earliest known history of the item under consideration—is a valuable concept. As we trace the story contained in the publication I refer to as the Ashtabula book, we've already learned just how the home by that name originated, and the house history of all who owned the property from its original builder up until it was donated by the Mead Corporation to the Foundation for Historic Restoration in Pendleton Area in 1961.

As for the thin sliver of the home's history when my third great grandparents, Ozey R. and Sarah Taliaferro Broyles, lived there, that story is mostly told before the close of the second chapter in the book. The main purpose of the book—the part we have yet to cover—was to include the diary of Clarissa Adger Bowen, whose family likely were the people who originally dubbed the plantation by that name, Ashtabula.

Furthermore, the significance of the diary—to me, at least, in this juncture in my family history research—is to report, from an eyewitness perspective, those tenuous days immediately following the close of the Civil War in Pendleton and the larger Anderson County area. This, I hoped to find, would open my own eyes to the broader perspectives of that era which I saw as puzzling, to say the least, when researching another set of third great grandparents from my southern family lines, the McClellans in Florida.

One other perspective that is turning out to be helpful in that research quest also has to do with provenance, as well—only not the type of provenance one usually thinks of, when hearing that word. This time, the provenance I'm appreciating is that of the mention of the many resources the book's compiler is crediting as she quotes liberally from a wide variety of sources. Mary Stevenson was careful to provide titles and author's names for several books from that era, as well as sourcing the passages from letters held in various archives and collections—all of which I'd be hard pressed to locate on my own, without knowledge of who might be the likeliest candidate to write such material. Let's say I have come to see that tedious bane of the writer—footnotes and bibliographies—in a different light now; the next time you grimace at the thought of getting the format right when writing up footnotes, just think of them as providing provenance for an idea.

From that listing provided by Mary Stevenson in the Ashtabula book, I'm able to retrace the compiler's steps while taking the liberty to look around at the rest of the contents for my own purposes, an invaluable gift to a researcher, indeed. While from this point forward, it may seem as if we are leaving behind the specific story of the Broyles family—after all, they moved away from Pendleton long before the start of the Civil War—but even in the body of the remainder of the book, the reprint of the diary of Clarissa Adger Bowen and the compiler's introductory commentary, we still can find mentions of the extended Broyles family members. Thus, the value of finding so many resources where the compiler provides the provenance, so to speak, of the information she has included in the Ashtabula book.

With that said, tomorrow, we'll move on to look at the disturbing events that rocked the town of Pendleton and the entire Anderson County area of South Carolina at the close of the Civil War in 1865. 

Another Two Weeks, Another Tally

We've barely passed a week since companies celebrated National DNA Day with the kind of sales genetic genealogists are always interested in seeing, but already, the uptick in my DNA matches has doubled—in one case, more than tripled—my usual biweekly increase. Now, that's the kind of incentive to keep someone like me happy.

True, the end result—all the follow-through after making these new cousin discoveries—entails a lot more research work. But I'm okay with that. Not only am I seeing growth in the main tree I've been focusing on since the beginning of 2019—my mother's McClellan, and now Broyles, families—but I've gone back to working on my mother-in-law's large tree, as well as both my father's and even my father-in-law's trees. Even a little leap in the numbers can be encouraging.

My mother's tree is where the bulk of the action happened in the last two weeks, as always. There, I've managed to add another 310 individuals to bring the total in that database to 18,039 people. But with the discovery of another obituary of a distant cousin in my mother-in-law's tree, I made enough notes on that branch to add seventy names, bringing up her tree's count to 16,186 people. And on my father's tree, I'm still working out some discoveries from the prior two weeks' work, which allowed me to again add four more names, totaling 538 names. Even my father-in-law's tree saw some progress, thanks to a new DNA match discovery (which I'm still working on); so far, I've added three more names to bring that total up to 1,518.

So where was the big jump in DNA matches, you ask? This time, the bonanza came from Family Tree DNA, where my matches increased by seventy two new names in the last two weeks, and my husband's matches went up by a more modest—but certainly welcome—forty three. While that big bulge in biweekly additions is likely an aberration and not owing to this most recent sale, I'm sure that increased trend will continue for a short while. By the time I work my way through that additional data, it will almost be time for sales promotions for Mother's Day, Father's Day, and state and national genealogical conferences to add even further to the increase in matches. Any excuse to get some good DNA news is fine in my book!

Now Indexing : More South Carolina Records

Since I've lately been working on my family roots in the form of the Broyles family from Upcountry South Carolina, it made sense, now that it's time for this weekend's indexing effort, to continue working on the current designated "Restore the Ancestors 2019" project at FamilySearch.org. Right now, the project is dedicated to finishing the collection of Colleton County Marriage Licenses.

Though Colleton County is much closer to the Atlantic coast than my Broyles forebears in Anderson County, it still is part of the same home state.  Besides, my intention in participating in this volunteer indexing group is to help others, not merely myself. So I'm digging in to help wherever possible.

The current designated record set is now over fifty percent indexed. The records are listed as an intermediate level of indexing difficulty, but I found the process rather straightforward, other than having to decipher a few challenging handwriting samples.

By seeing an entire group of volunteers dedicated to making searchable selected record sets which will be of help to people seeking information on their ancestors of African heritage, hopefully, that will speed the process. Already, the 181-member Restore the Ancestors project has indexed over twenty thousand records, an impressive number, considering the project only began in March of this year. Hopefully, the word is still getting out and more people will join in to help. That "many hands make light work" mantra really does make a difference.

About the Broyles Brothers

It doesn't seem right, leaving the phase of life in which the Broyles family lived at Ashtabula without mentioning something more about the majority of those family members inhabiting the place. While the Ashtabula book focused mostly on the women associated with the home—and, granted, in that era, it did seem the home was the woman's domain, despite such rude outbreaks of boyish behavior as leaving one's mark by way of carving initials into the building—the three women in the Ozey R. Broyles family were definitely outnumbered by its patriarch and his eight sons. Before we move on to the rest of the material contained in the Ashtabula book, we should at least give a passing nod to those male offspring and provide a brief synopsis of what became of them.

As the Ashtabula book mentioned—in all of one breath, it seemed—the Broyles family included eight sons: Augustus, Charles, Zacharias, Richard, William, Ozey, Thomas, and John. However, not all of them lived to see the family move from the country plantation at Ashtabula to their in-town residence in Anderson, South Carolina. One, in fact, died as an infant long before the family even acquired their home at Ashtabula—Richard Taliaferro Broyles, who, along with his teenaged brother Zacharias much later in 1843, were both interred, not on the Broyles property, but in the family cemetery belonging to their aunt and uncle Simpson.

The others, though, I can assure you lived long lives after their boyhood memories of Ashtabula. Augustus Taliaferro Broyles, as the oldest and having never married, lived, for the most part, at the family homes in both Pendleton and Anderson. Charles Edward, the second-born, married Lucy Ann Johnson in South Carolina in 1848, but then moved his growing family out of state before 1850, long before his parents sold Ashtabula; his was a long and double life, moving before the death of his wife from his home in Georgia to Colorado where, marrying again, he raised a second, large family in Conejos County.

With the loss of Ozey and Sarah Broyles' third and fourth sons, the next in line was William Henry Broyles. He it was who headed to Georgia to marry his second cousin on the Taliaferro side of the family in 1857; after the war, they relocated from their home in Tennessee to Alabama. Likewise, sixth son Ozey Robert Broyles—possibly the first of the Broyles children actually born at Ashtabula—eventually relocated to Tennessee, though he married a Charleston girl, Ella Wilkinson Keith, and remained in his home state until the late 1880s. Seventh son, my second great-grandfather Thomas Taliaferro Broyles, also headed to Tennessee, though not until claiming his own bride from among the descendants of the related Taliaferro family in Georgia.

It was not until the last of the Broyles sons that we see another descendant of Ozey and Sarah remaining in South Carolina. From the date of his birth at Ashtabula in 1846 until his death in nearby Anderson in 1927, it appears John Pendleton Broyles, his wife Elizabeth Hubbard, and their four children remained as lifelong South Carolina residents.

Perhaps there was some significance, after all, to the pattern of just whose initials were carved into the basement supports at Ashtabula. Of all eight sons, it was those two whose initials still remain visible at Ashtabula—Augustus Taliaferro Broyles, the attorney, and John Pendleton Broyles, the farmer—who remained behind near the old family home for the rest of their lives.

Another May Party

While the wedding celebration of Sarah Taliaferro Broyles' sister Caroline may have been hosted at Ashtabula, there was one more happy occasion which involved the Broyles family, at about the time when they moved away from Pendleton in 1851.  The event, as noted in the Ashtabula book, recalls an earlier time in the life of the younger of the Broyles' two daughters.

While the eldest daughter of Ozey and Sarah Broyles—Margaret—had actually married in New York City, home of her husband-to-be, Sarah, the younger of the two daughters, likely saw her wedding ceremony in 1860 in the new home the Broyleses purchased after their move from Pendleton. After that point, she and her husband, merchant William Dickson Williams, moved away to Greeneville, an eastern Tennessee town then approaching a scant thousand residents.

After Sarah Broyles Williams' death in 1928, someone had written a letter reminiscing about various members of the Broyles family, which was shared in the Ashtabula book. The letter told about an event held, possibly in Anderson after the Broyles family had moved from Ashtabula:

In the early fifties there was a May party in the old Johnson seminary, that stood on the lot of the pastorium on the first Baptist Church.... It was a community affair and was largely attended; it was really a party for they had things to eat.... Dr. Broyles's youngest daughter was the May Queen and well she acted the part.

When the family moved from Ashtabula in 1851, they settled in nearby Anderson, where they purchased "a large, well-built dwelling with handsome entrance" where some members of the Broyles family remained well past Ozey Broyles' passing in 1875 and his wife's death in 1888. At that point, the property likely was inherited by their oldest son, Augustus, the attorney with the impeccable eye for detail in his clients' wills. After Augustus' passing in 1904, the property was sold to someone outside the family, and the original resting place of its owners was transferred from under the trees in the front yard to a proper cemetery in town.

Meanwhile, the Ashtabula place itself—the dear home built by the patriarch of the Gibbes family, and then cherished for fourteen years by the Broyles family—also changed hands. Immediately purchased in 1851 by Yale graduate James Theodore Latta, in 1862, a few years prior to his early passing due to continued poor health, he sold the property to Robert Adger. And thus, the beautiful home and the twelve hundred acres upon which it was situated changed hands once again to the extended Adger and Bowen family—and particularly one daughter, Clarissa, whose diary marks the body of the manuscript from which this brief house history of Ashtabula had been affixed. 

A May Party

The Broyles family lived at their home outside Pendleton, South Carolina—later dubbed Ashtabula—from 1837 until sometime in 1851. During that time, not all effort was solely devoted to farming or even to the types of activities which might be of more interest to the family's eight sons. A few times noted in the Ashtabula book seemed to be more for the honor of the women associated with Ozey Broyles or his wife, Sarah Taliaferro Broyles.

One of those specific events noted happened just as the family was preparing to leave for a more modest home in town—and we'll talk about that event tomorrow—but an earlier event, in 1844, may also have been hosted at the Broyles home. Sarah's youngest sister, Caroline Taliaferro, orphaned by the loss of her mother in 1822 and her father in 1831, had, by that point in 1844, reached the age of thirty two—in that era, far exceeding the typical marriage age of most young women.

The Ashtabula book notes that Caroline had had "many suitors" including one whose later demise would certainly have been cause for great alarm in the family. That suitor, a recent graduate of South Carolina College by the name of Turner Bynum, happened to be an excellent shot, fitting in well with the plans of political opponents of Benjamin F. Perry, a strong Union supporter who was not shy about making his political opinions known through publication of his newspaper in Greenville.

Perry's opponents, as we've lately seen was customary in the south during that era, planned to entice the man into entering into a duel as a result of a perceived quarrel over the rightness and honor of his position. Unfortunately for those opponents of Perry—an attorney who later went on to become governor of the state of South Carolina—the man they selected, Turner Bynum, despite being a good shot, almost immediately lost the contest.

At that point in 1832, Caroline Taliaferro would have been twenty years of age. Whether she had considered the attention of Turner Bynum seriously, we have no way of knowing. That she remained single for the next twelve years may have spoken volumes.

However, on May 1, 1844, Caroline was wed to Henry Campbell Miller, a South Carolina doctor. It is unclear where the youngest Taliaferro daughter had actually been living at the time leading up to her wedding, as pre-1850 census enumerations do not provide names of all household members. Caroline's name did appear as a separate entry in the 1840 census, just below the entry for R. Simpson, likely her brother-in-law, but the entry only indicated one single woman, alone.

Even if Caroline had become the sole possessor of her parents' vacated home, it would not be unlikely that she spent much time at the home of her oldest sister, Sarah Taliaferro Broyles. Thus, the Ashtabula book's supposition—"It is said that Caroline's wedding party was given at Ashtabula"—may indeed have been correct.