Up a Tree

 The most fruitful source of information on my family tree flows through my maternal grandmother. The clipper Great Republic All the other lines peter out but not before showing ancestors from Germany and England, which gives me German heritage on both sides of my family. And that makes my Irish heritage rather puny at this point, since I've not found anything on the grandfather who is the primary source of Irishness on my side of the family. I bring this up because I've always been proud of my immigrant heritage because my parents often referred to their parents as immigrants. If you've read any of the early posts in this series, a certain amount of doubt has crept into the origin stories I was told about two of those grandparents, leaving only my German grandmother with solid bonafides as an immigrant -- I even found a listing for her on the Ellis Island website. Imagine, if you can, my surprise in finding that I also have relatives who go back to some of America's fo...

"Bloody" Bill Cunningham appeared briefly in my last post because records show he was responsible William Cunningham for the death of one of Sharon's distant cousins, Dannett Abney, during the American Revolution. I didn't really have space to go into much of his background but wanted to return to his story.  Imagine my surprise when I found that Cunningham had also participated in a battle involving another of Sharon's ancestors, Capt. John Weir, at the Battle of Kings Mountain. (See "Kings of Kings Mountain, published on April 9.) I suppose that shouldn't surprise me, but it was a serendipitous coincidence. Remember that  the Revolution went beyond the war against Britain and was very much a civil war as well, pitting American loyalists, or Tories, against revolutionaries -- Whigs or patriots. Much of Cunningham's involvement, and the worst of his behavior lies in this civil war aspect. Cunningham originally enlisted in a South Carolina Whig militia...

 You sort of have to feel sorry for Georgia. In the War Between the States, aka the Civil War, Georgia became the focus of General William Tecumseh Sherman, who devastatingly marched through the South near the end of the war and set Atlanta on fire.  But I was surprised to find that Georgia featured prominently in the end game of the Revolutionary War as well. Much of the focus at that time fell on Savannah. As I mentioned in the last post, Sharon has relatives who were members of state militias during the Revolutionary Way. Pvt. Michael Abney lies in her direct line of succession, which makes him a great-great-great something or other. Michael appears on a roster of soldiers from South Carolina along with six other Abneys. Given that families back then seemed to love using a sometimes limited number of names, even with large broods of children. I'm pretty sure the men are all related, but I was only able to determine that Michael three brothers with names that appear in the r...

 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 ...

 The particular genealogy site I'm using for these posts displays some thumbnail pictures beside the names of ancestors on the tree. These are taken from pictures that family researchers have uploaded to the site, and I've learned that sometimes the person so honored will have accomplished some interesting achievement. It's certainly far from foolproof, but as I was climbing up my wife's side of the tree and not finding much material, I ran across a picture of a cabin or barn or some such. Whoever loaded this picture included no information about it. Were I to hazard a guess, I'd say it's located somewhere in Maryland, where the relative in question, Cornelius Shehane Sr., was interred. (I worked briefly at a funeral home while in college where I learned that particular bit of verbal camoflage.) I looked at the other items attached to his record and read this bit of information: Cornelius Shehane came from Ireland in 1678 via Barbados as an indentured servant. W...

 I began idly clicking one day through the section of our family tree that branches off from Sharon's father and ran across an entry that was accompanied by the picture, below right,  of a postcard stamp honoring the Battle of Kings Mountain in 1780. As best as I can tell, the USPS issued the stamp to mark the 200th anniversary of the battle. I showed Sharon the picture, and because it showed up on the tree entry of one her ancestors, Capt. John Weir, mistakenly assumed that he was the soldier pictured. Once I began reading about the battle, I understood that he was not the soldier pictured. Still, I had to look up the battle, as I don't recall having ever heard of it before. This is not surprising because I've read little about the Revolutionary War, and if my school texts mentioned the battle, I either missed it or completely forgot about it. The National Parks Service administers a national military park in South Carolina at the site of the battle and and its website sta...

 This week we switch over to my wife's, Sharon's, side of the family. As I learned after I married into the Reagan-Lackey-Womble clan, you could go just about anywhere in Texas and wind up finding someone she was related to. This is natural, considering many people in the southern and southeastern states seemed to have followed at least the second half of the Davy Crockett quote and headed for Texas in the 1800s. And a quick glance at Sharon's side of the tree shows a number of relatives who started out in Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky. And though it's not a southern state, many came from Missouri. If you ask Google where most of the immigrants to Texas came from in the 1820s, it will tell you, Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri.  In the early part of the century, many of these immigrants came to the state either by traveling the Mississippi River, presumably exiting in one of the states to the east and then heading our direction, or by the "Old San...