Up a Tree

John Amous Womble, Sharon's third great-grandfather, returned to his life as a carpenter after the Revolutionary War, marrying his wife Catherine Greene in 1798 and purchasing land the next year. He seems to have taken God's command to be fruitful and multiply seriously and fathered 11 children, though only five appear on the list of his children on FamilySearch.com. He was 43 when he married, and his wife was about 22, and a note in his file indicates he'd been married before, stating that six of his children were not Catherine's.  In an affidavit supporting his claim for a pension,  he only mentions the one wife and the children, so like much else in his life, the broad strokes produce a fuzzy picture. By 1820 he found himself in dire straits financially and decided to make that claim for a pension under a bill that Congress passed two years before.  The new law provided for a pension for every person who served in the war -- soldiers, musicians, hospital staff and me...

I thought I had figured out a solution or two to my problem of what Continental Army unit Sharon's third great-grandfather belonged to, and that I would be able to report a result that returned me from not-so-wonder(ful) land. Alas, both solutions proved ineffective. I found a new source listing soldiers from North Carolina who'd fought in the Revolutionary War -- a list published by the Daughters of the American Revolution. The work is available on Google Books and is searchable. Alas, the section I could look through online did not include units and ranks of the soldiers, just their names accompanied by a number. I didn't take the opportunity to find out what the numbers meant but did look for her ancestor's name. He wasn't on the list. Perhaps he appears somewhere else in the volume, but I only had access to a section of the work. I didn't find that particularly problematic except that it gave no support to John Womble's affidavit or the other  source I...

I mentioned in the last post that Sharon's ancestor had attached himself to a doctor as a servant to gain parole and escape the horrors of a prison ship. I did not go into detail about those horrors because I try to keep the length of these posts down. But as our exploration of the conditions and dangers aboard the ships that brought colonists to America, we need to understand what being a prisoner during the Revolutionary War entailed. We are used to movies and television, which rarely show us the brutalities of any particular era. No Geneva Convention covered the treatment of prisoners. The ships weren't the sleek, metallic vessels capable of handling hundreds or thousands of individuals we see in our modern harbors. If you've ever been aboard a wooden sailing vessel -- preserved or re-created -- you've had a chance to see how cramped and utilitarian they are. And the hardtack and water shown in some cinematic portrayals of ship life from the era would have been mann...