I have had an interest in Genealogy for more than 30 years.  I knew that Diane was interested in family history too because that is what led me to contact her in 2001 after being out of touch for 33 years.  We were both seeking information on our common Eberhart family roots.  But I didn’t know that Gary had an interest too.  I became interested myself in 1977 when I watched the TV mini-series “Roots”.  I loved the story and the family aspect of it all.  I began to ask my family what they knew about our family history and it snowballed from there.  I have done a little searching here and there through the years.  I think most people might be surprised at who they are related to… famous and infamous... and just plain interesting.

As an example, I found a newspaper story about one of my great-great grandfathers in an 1890 edition of The Hartwell Times.  The story was headlined “DUEL TO THE DEATH: A Bloody Encounter Between Two Madison County Farmers”.  An ongoing feud between my ancestor and his neighbor included several court appearances against each other.  It all culminated in a showdown one afternoon in a field with pistols and shotguns.  It seems the neighbor thought my great-great-grandfather was chasing and shooting at his hogs and that was the final straw.  Both men died in the shootout.  Fortunately my ancestor’s son (my great-grandfather) was already born at the time, or else I would not be here to tell the tale.  Who knew that Madison County was the Wild Wild West in 1890?

On another note, I have also discovered that I have Yankee blood in my family tree…”New York Yankee” blood.  I am a cousin to Spud Chandler who was born in Franklin County, Georgia and then grew up near Commerce.  He was a star halfback for the Georgia Bulldogs Football Team (1929-1932) and played in the first game ever played in Sanford Stadium in 1929.  He was also a star pitcher on the Bulldogs Baseball Team, and was signed by the New York Yankees organization to a minor league contract out of college.  His major league career began in 1937 on Yankee teams that included Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio as his teammates.  Spud was the first pitcher to pitch to Yogi Berra when he came up as a rookie catcher in 1946.  The Yankees won six World Series Championships while Spud was on the team, and he was named to the American League All-Star team four times.  He was also named American League Most Valuable Player (MVP) in 1943.  He still holds the Major League record for best winning percentage by a pitcher with more than 100 career wins… he won 109 games and lost only 43.  Spud pitched for the Yankees 11 seasons, and his career ended with an arm injury.  The last batter he faced in his last major league game was Jackie Robinson… he got him to pop out to the shortstop.  And a final note… while I am proud of my “Yankee” coousin and his accomplishments, I still cannot stand the New York Yankees.  Go Braves!

Wow!  Some heritage you have there Don.  Now to bore everyone with what I discovered about MY heritage.  When I retired from the Navy in 1994 my father came up from Valdosta one week and said he wanted to go visit his cousins in South Carolina.  I wasn't working at the time so I agreed to take him.  We headed for South Carolina - notice the lack of a definitive destination.  My father's mode of travel was always "in that general direction".  We arrived in a small South Carolina town (I forget the name) and got a bite to eat at the local DQ.  My father asked the proprieter if he knew where XXXX Grice lived.  No.  As we exited the eatery we saw a car with a sign on it that said "Mail Carrier" at the local 7-11.  We approached the drive and found out that his wife was in fact the mail carrier.  He didn't know where the Grice's lived but called his wife who was able to give us directions to two families in the area.  Off through the wilds of SC we went.  We stopped at what we thought was the first Grice home only to be redirected to another house.  Finally, we found one of his cousins!  After a pretty long visit, along came another cousin that had been fishing.  He had some of the biggest catfish I had ever seen in the bed of his pick-up.  I learned that my grand father Grice was one of seven sons and the only one to leave South Carolina.  I still am unsure how or why he ended up in south Georgia.  I was told that the Grice's originally settled in Texas and were "recruited" by the Confederacy to produce medicinal alcohol (moonshiners) and migrated to South Carolina.  My great grand father Grice was a chair maker, rockers more specifically and would haul them to market once or twice a month.  We spent the night in Columbia and the next morning visited a cousin who was in assisted living due to brown lung disease she acquired from working in the cotton mill.  Before heading back home we stopped by a job site where his cousin was working.  I discovered that that cousin made a living laying brick for smoke stacks - inside and out.  That journey led to my attending three subsequent Grice Family Reunion.  My father never met a stranger but just couldn't get connected with the family his father left behind in South Carolina.  We did discover a common interest in "honkey tonking" and a love for music.  One relative even wrote a hit country song entitled "My Sweet Fraulein".  They also had a propensity to getting run over - by cars.  My grand father was run over by a hit and run driver one night and suffered a broken hip and head injuries.  This accident forced my father to quit school in the seventh grade and go to work to support the family.  A great uncle was killed by a drunk driver one night.  The story goes that swift justice was administered to the drunk driver as his demise came at the short end of a long rope.  Through the years I have collected many interesting stories of hard working folk struggling to get by the best they knew how.  No blue blood in these vains - or Cherokee Indian Princess great grandmother.  If you read this far, you really need to get a life!  Later.

More Genealogy:

I guess I can share that I own a cemetery.  No, not a plot.  A cemetery.  My brother's marker was delivered to the cemetery yesterday and I went by after work to do a little clean up.  Like too many cemeteries, it has become neglected as everyone has died off that remembers everyone buried there.  It is located on the Robert Hardeman Road, sort of in the front yard of the old home place (as it was called).  I may have conveyed this story before but I figure if I can't remember telling it, someone out there doesn't remember hearing it.  This cemetery was started as a favor to a distant family member.  This old fellow's wife died, as the story goes and so happened that the "old home place" was located approximately half way between where he lived and Winterville.  He asked if his wife could be buried there along side the road so he could talk to her whenever he went to town.  I was told you could hear him a mile away talking to her on his way to and from town.  Aunt Fannie was the last one buried there and we will be placing Larry's ashes there soon.  As "the old home place" was sold off, some remaining family members were afraid that the cemetery would be plowed under, so they had it separated and deeded to the "heirs of Wiley Hawkins Lester" - of which I am one of the few remaining.  There is another Lester Cemetery on Cherokee Road that may hold some other distant relatives.  I've got to check this out - maybe when I retire.  I dated a young lady in college that was into tombstone rubbings.  We gathered some interesting epitaphs which she took as part of the separation.  Needless to say, my interest was more in her than tombstones, but I was introduced to an interesting pastime - tombstone reading of course - what do you you think I was referring to?  Later.

Gary... I can't say that I own a cemetery, or do tombstone rubbings either for that matter, but I have searched for a gravestone here and there through the years in my pursuit of family history.  On a couple of occasions, when we were on our travels throughout other parts of the country, I persuaded Liz to let me take a little sidetrip to find an ancestor's final resting place.  But I usually just take photos instead of doing rubbings.  The oldest known gravestone that I have found was that of my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Colonel Jacob Lumpkin (1644-1708) who immigrated from England to the Colony of Virginia in 1667 (just 60 years after Jamestown was founded).  He lived and died before George Washington was even born and before America won it's Independence.  His grave still survives next to the door of Mattapony Baptist Church in King & Queen County, Virginia.  It is said that the slab for his tombstone was brought from England and engraved in America, inscribed in Latin.  I visited his grave and photographed it on a trip to Virginia in 2002.  He has been taking the eternal dirt nap now for 302 years... may he rest in peace.  

Gosh you really are into this ancestry thing Don!  I hope someday to devote more time to it for myself.  After I said what I did about my ancestors coming from Texas, I did a little Google search and look what I found:

GRICE, TEXAS. Grice, at the junction of Farm roads 852 and 1002, twelve miles west of Gilmer in western Upshur County, was established in the late 1880s or early 1890s near a heavily wooded area known as the Big Woods. The community was originally called Hamil's Chapel for a small Baptist church organized not long after the Civil War. Around 1890 John J. Grice opened a store and post office there. The post office became known as Grice, but the church continued for several years to be known as Hamil's Chapel. By 1896 the community had a gristmill and cotton gin, a general store, a wagonmaker, two carpenters, and an estimated population of twenty-four. A Grice school began operating before 1900, and by 1907 it had an enrollment of 126. Around 1900 the town also had a saloon. After 1900 Grice began to decline. The Marshall and East Texas Railway bypassed the town, and many community residents moved away. The Grice post office closed in 1905. By the mid-1930s the community had a school, two churches, and two or three stores; its population in 1936 was estimated at twenty. After World War II the Grice school was consolidated with the Harmony consolidated school district, and in the mid-1960s all that remained of Grice was a church, a cemetery, and a few scattered houses. In 1990 Grice was a dispersed community with an estimated population of 20 to 150. The population remained the same in 2000.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: G. H. Baird, A Brief History of Upshur County (Gilmer, Texas: Gilmer Mirror, 1946). Doyal T. Loyd, History of Upshur County (Waco: Texian Press, 1987).

Later.

You reckon I might "own" another one?  Ha!  Later.

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I just noted how appropriate my avatar was!!!! Goin' home to Texas......

Since Diane has not yet followed up on her Civil War family history, I will share some of my own. The Civil War still evokes such strong feelings here in the South, and seeing the actual records like Diane downloaded makes it more real and personal, instead of something you just read about in history books.  For those who have never thought much about your family history, the number of your DIRECT LINE ancestors doubles with each generation you go back in time… 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, 32, 64, 128, etc.   If you have a southern heritage, it is almost certain that you had one or more ancestors that fought in the Civil War, and probably for the Confederacy.   Through the years I have discovered that several of my 8 great-great-grandfathers served in some capacity in the Civil War, all for the Confederacy.  I think that is probably not unusual here in the South and it is very interesting to find some of the details.

My great-great-grandfather Thornton Howington Chandler was a 38-year old farmer in Madison County with 10 children when the Civil War was drawing close to Georgia in the summer of 1863.  He enlisted in the Confederate Infantry in September 1863  and was part of the Atlanta Campaign serving under General Joseph E. Johnston, and fought against General William T. Sherman’s army as the Yankees drew ever closer to Atlanta.  Thornton was wounded in the left arm, taking out a big chunk of his arm muscle but missing the bone.  I’m not sure in exactly which battle he was wounded, but my educated guess based on muster rolls is that it was the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in late June 1864.  Battlefield conditions being what they were, his arm wound became badly infected.  And according to the family, it became “infested with maggots” that may have been a blessing in disguise as they “ate up the infection.”  His arm was saved and escaped the common fate of amputation.  He proudly lived with what he called his “Yankee Scar” the rest of his life and died in 1911 at the ripe old age of 86.

Another great-great-grandfather on my mother's side of the family, Dr. William Stack Meiere was the local town doctor and surgeon in Madison, Georgia and operated a Drug Store before the Civil War.  He also owned seven household slaves when the war broke out in 1861.  He enlisted in the Confederacy and was commissioned a Civil War Surgeon, serving at one point under General Stonewall Jackson.  Surrounded by the most unsanitary conditions possible, he contracted Tuberculosis himself in late 1863 and returned home where he died at 38 years of age in early 1864.  Far more soldiers in the Civil War died of sickness, disease and infection than they did from bullet wounds. The Meiere family home in Madison still stands… the town was spared from General Sherman’s torch after he burned Atlanta and marched through Georgia.  Sherman decided not to burn Madison at the special request of a local Yankee sympathizer, but destroyed almost everything else in sight on his way to the sea, and then presented the City of Savannah as a Christmas gift to President Abraham Lincoln.

And another paternal great-great-grandfather, John Hawkins Bullock was a Madison County farmer who joined the Confederacy in 1862 and served in Cobb’s Legion Cavalry under General Jeb Stuart.  He was a wagon driver and was captured by Yankees at the Battle of Brandy Station, Virginia in 1863.  He was held for a short time as a Prisoner of War in Old Capitol Prison in Washington, DC and was released in a prisoner exchange just before the Battle of Gettysburg.  He survived the war without a single wound and was present at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia when General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederate Army in 1865.  He too lived to the ripe old age of 86 and died in 1925.

My bet is that many of you have a similar Civil War heritage, even though you may not know about it.  If you do know some of your family history, I would love to read about it if you would share it with us on this forum.