Revolutionary War patriot

 This picture shows up in a listing for another of Sharon's ancestors, listed on the family tree as Pvt. Michael Abney: 

I suspect that whoever put it in the family tree looked around on the internet, found this image, liked it, and decided to associate it with Michael Abney's entry. The image appears to come from an archive hosted by Georgia State University in Atlanta.

I managed to find a site called Carolana.com that contains records of regiments that participated in the Revolutionary War, including lists of the soldiers who composed the regiments. 

As an aside, Carolana.com's home page contains this bit of historical lore: "In 1629, King Charles I of England "erected into a province" all the land from the Albemarle Sound in the north to the St. John's River in the south, which he directed should be named Carolana. Carolana is from the word Carolus, the Latin form of Charles, and the name he personally selected for his new colony. Carolina is the name King Charles II used in 1663 to finally implement his father's original vision of 1629." Of course that territory become the two Carolinas we know today.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled post: 

A Michael Abney, along with six others with the surname, appears on one of those lists as part of the Upper Ninety-Sixth District Regiment, a militia unit, for South Carolina. 

Sharon's great-great-great whatever relation of the same name was born in Virginia -- and several of her relatives are tied to the Virginia colony -- later married in South Carolina, and is buried there. Another record attached to the family tree seems to confirm that I found him, but whoever made the entry may be relying on the same website I am.

This site contains a list of engagements that Abney's regiment participated in, but the summaries of those battles and skirmishes are very short and only list certain of the officers involved. So I can't pin down which one(s) Abney may have taken part in. 

One of those engagements is listed at the Florida Expedition or the March Through Georgia. Nothing in the description relates any ties to Florida, so I'm not sure why it's mentioned, but having South Carolina militiamen marching through Georgia might explain the link to today's image.

Speaking of Florida, South Carolinians participated in a number of actions in Florida during the war. Now I'm sure you were a better student than I was during your American history classes, so you're not surprised by this information. But for some reason, perhaps because the little I know about Florida is that it began pretty much as a Spanish colony, I don't much associate Florida with the American revolution. Silly me. 

Florida became a British colony in 1763, at the end of the French and Indian War after the Treaty of Paris was signed. During that war, England captured Havana, one of Spain's best ports, and Spain agreed to swap Havana for Florida. 

Ah the stuff I really should know. I want to continue the history associated with Michael Abney's era and look more closely at the March Through Georgia next week. 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Road not Taken

Image
I mentioned last week that I would check to see if I was related to Robert Frost or Robert Burns. I meant it as a joke, but as the week progressed, I decided I would follow up on the idea, including another couple of famous poets, W.B. Yeats and John Keats while I was at it.  As I've said before, if you broaden your search beyond direct ancestors -- your great and great-to-the-X grandparents, the chances you are related to someone famous multiply greatly, and some of the genealogy sites make the search pretty easy. Give them enough information to pinpoint the person you're looking for, click an icon, and voila, the information pops up.  The program I use won't identify relations beyond 15 generations, but you can still go back pretty far. I ran the four men I cited above and found that our family is related to two of them -- Yeats, who married a 10th cousin, three times removed, and Frost, a 6th cousin, three times removed. I'll skip which side of the family is related ...
Read more

TJ and the Liberties: That infamous letter

Image
A letter such as the one sent by the Danbury Baptist Association to a sitting president needed to be answered. When I first read it, I was a little confused because the letter doesn't seem to indicate that the writers knew anything about the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment, which were ratified a decade before they contacted President Jefferson.  Now I wonder if they were testing the President. How committed was he to religious freedom? After all, his politics trended to a "states' rights" perspective. Now that he held the president, would he commit to defending religious rights for everyone as part of the duties of his office, or might he side with states that had enacted establishment legislation and defer to them in the hopes that they, like his home state, might see the light and disestablish their Christian denominations? I've not read widely enough to settle these questions. But keep them in mind when you consider the contents of the letter. Take a min...
Read more

TJ and the Liberties: Who were those pesky Baptists

Image
I neglected to mention last time the outcome of the "Bill Establishing a Provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion" -- it failed. Perhaps you already guessed that.  I should also point out Patrick Henry's reasoning on the bill. Simply put people who follow religion -- and yes, I know that whole argument about how "Christianity's not a religion, etc." -- and who regularly attend churches for religious instruction tend to be the kind of citizens we want to foster: prone to follow rules (laws), not given as much to being quarrelsome, more generous than the average unchurced person, regular nice people. And government should want to prop up an institution that creates these law-abiding, somewhat passive citizens. I see this reasoning quoted in an annual ad by a commercial business that used to appear in the papers I read. Ben Franklin -- hardly a Christian icon -- and George Washington -- pretty much your standard Anglican churchgoer -- believed the same ...
Read more