Up a Tree

I return to my part of the family tree and that most fruitful of the branches, the lines of Orpha Morse. As usual, I rummaged around in the names until I came on an ancestor whose listing contained biographical notes.  In this week's case, the relative in question is Francis Holmes, also sometimes referred to as Francis Homes. Francis seems to be an immigrant from England who began life in America in the Massachusetts Bay colony. In 1636, he and his family sold their land to newly arrived Puritan immigrants and moved to Watertown, Conn.  About the time the Holmses moved to Connecticut, Thomas Hooker, a Congregationalist minister who became known as the "father of Connecticut," decided to take a group of residents from Waterford, Conn., on a two-week journey, following a Native American trail, to a spot near present-day Hartford, where they began a settlement.  One of the sources I found on Francis indicates that his family was one of the group, but I can't pin that do...

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...

John Amous Womble, Sharon's fifth great-grandfather, joined in the Revolutionary War effort as a soldier in the North Carolina Line of the Continental Army. In this context the word "line" refers to the units that constituted the troops recruited or stationed in a particular area. The soldiers enlisted for a term of not less than six months.  These units included regular soldiers and special units such as artillery companies and "light dragoons," or cavalry troops. These latter seem to have served both as combat troops and reconnaissance  units. John lists his first combat engagement was an attempt to take back the city of Savannah, Georgia, from the British, who had taken the city in 1778. At the outset of hostilities, the British invested much effort in the southern colonies because they believed those areas contained a high proportion of loyalists -- those faithful to the Crown -- and they would face less resistance. They believed this based on the reports of...

I moved up the tree this week to Sharon's fifth great grandfather and proceed to fall into a historical rabbit hole that did not lead to any sort of Wonderland. But let's begin at the beginning. John Amous Womble was born sometime in 1755 or 1756 in Edgecombe, North Carolina. For the geographically challenged like me, that's about 70 miles east of Raleigh, about halfway to the coast. I can't find a town called Edgecombe, just Edgecombe County, and Google tells me it is part of the Rocky Mount Metropolitan Statistical Area. I don't generally think of a town with a population of 55,000 as metropolitan, but I'm sure it's just a governmental designation. John was a carpenter by trade, and at the age of 23, he joined the North Carolina Continental Line to fight in the Revolutionary War. This is where I fell off the branch into the rabbit hole. Information provided in his Family Search entry indicates that he joined the 10th North Carolina Regiment on June 1, 1779...

I mentioned in the last post that the unit Sharon's triple great grandfather belonged to was stationed in Marshall, Texas, at the end of the war and was told to report to Shreveport to obtain a parole before returning home. But what does that mean, my astute wife asked? That's what I'll discuss today. In today's thought, we'd most likely hear the word "parole" and think about prisoners in correctional institutions. We've seen the dramatizations of parole boards sitting to decide whether a  prisoner should be released before the end of his/her release. And we know that paroles come with conditions.  The idea in war is not too different and seems mostly to be a way of managing prisoner of war populations. Maintaining prison camps demanded manpower and supplies, and if you can rid yourself of these detainees, all the better. I remember an episode in a televised Horatio Hornblower series in which the good captain has been captured by the French. At one poi...