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It's Happy Dance Time again!

Jun4

Also known as “The-Civil-War-Union-Pension-File-of-Isaac-Turner-Just-Arrived-

And-It-Only-Took-19-Days-Instead-Of-42-To-120-Calendar-Days

-To-Get-Here” Dance!

I’m so excited, and so proud of myself, too! Why excited? I’ll get to that in just a sec…

Why so proud of myself? Because I was cutting the grass in my front yard when the very nice UPS man arrived with said Pension File…and I finished cutting the grass before I opened the envelope!!!

Ok, enough silliness…What about the file?

Well, to start out, it was a $75 gamble just to request the file, because I had no clue that any of my direct ancestors fought on the Union Side in the Civil War. My ancestors are from Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, Texas- all essentially Confederate states. The Civil War Pension file index listed Isaac Turner’s widow as Sarah S Turner of Texas, which were all the correct names, but still, I wasn’t 100% sure it was my Sarah S Turner.

When the file arrived this morning, the first thing I did (after cutting the grass!) was fish through the papers to find an address or location in Texas for this Sarah S Turner. There it was: Abbott, Texas! A bit more fishing and I found her three minor children named, as well as 2 older sons and a son-in-law.

THIS IS THE CORRECT CIVIL WAR UNION PENSION FILE! ISAAC TURNER DID FIGHT FOR THE UNION!

(dancing, dancing, dancing…)

The file contains 55, mostly hand-written pages of documents, so it’s gonna take a spell to get through it all. But a quick jog through the pages has yielded some interesting finds:

  1. I have the wrong date of death for Isaac Turner in my database- there are several documents, including one hand-written by Sarah herself, and other by the doctor who attended Isaac Turner when he died from “Typhoid Malarial Fever” on 20 Sep 1888, not 21 May 1887, as I previously believed!
  2. There is a “notarized” copy of Isaac & Sarah’s marriage license from Cannon County, Tennessee!
  3. There are several statements from friends and neighbors of the Turners testifying to Sarah’s financial situation.
  4. There are 2 statements, one from Sarah, about one of her daughters who went insane and was committed to the “lunatic asylum”! I’m pretty sure this was Edna Lenora Turner, who died at age 33 after being “an invalid for several years”. This is one item that would probably not be well-known, as things like that weren’t talked about.

I haven’t decided if Sarah actually got the pension, yet, as it was first rejected because she owned too much property, apparently. That’s where all the testimonials from the neighbors came in.

Here’s Sarah’s 3-page, hand-written deposition:

Sarah S Turner Pension Appilcation Deposition, Page 1

Sarah S Turner Pension Appilcation Deposition, Page 2

Sarah S Turner Pension Appilcation Deposition, Page 3

Fascinating stuff! I know these images aren’t the best. The pages are too big for my scanner, so I snapped these pix with my digital camera, and it needs a bit of adjustment for this task. I’ll redo them later, I promise!

My next task is to transcribe this entire file…if I can stop dancing long enough to type!

It’s Happy Dance time!

May16

May I introduce my second great-grandparents, Dr Nathan Blunt Kennedy and Susan William Lee Martin Kennedy!

A few weeks ago, my cousin Susan gave me some old photos scanned onto a disc, that she was using for a family project. Several of the images I already had, but there were also several that I had never seen before. This was one of the new ones. I have been studying this ever since and have been hoping against hope that it might be Dr Kennedy! I had sent a message to Susan and she was trying to find out from her mom (my Aunt Kathy) if she knew who these folks were, as Kathy has the original images.

Well, when I got home from work this evening, there was an email from Susan, and…

IT IS DR KENNEDY!

“This photo is Nathan Kennedy and his wife (my namesake), Susan William Lee Kennedy.  Are you doing a happy dance yet???  LOL!”

I AM SO EXCITED!!! I am going to print this image out full-size and find a very special frame for it! It is such an amazing shot! Even the veins in the good doctor’s hand are visible! Dr Kennedy was born in 1837, and he looks to be no more than 40 years old in this image, probably younger. Dr Kennedy and his family moved to Hillsboro, Texas in about the spring of 1871, so this image must have been taken very near to that time period, soon after arriving in Texas.

A scoundrel no more!

May3

One of the first death certificates that I obtained when I first began to research my family tree was that of my great-grandmother, Ruth (Carroll) Carr. Her father, as listed on the death certificate, was John Spurgeon. A bit of research indicated that his name was actually John Spurgeon Carroll. The lesson here is that just because it’s on an official government document doesn’t make it true! Anyway, I started searching for my second great-grandfather, John Spurgeon Carroll.

I found him in the 1870, 1880 and 1900 Federal Censuses without too much trouble, but then he vanished after 1900. I have been looking for him for almost 5 years!

Somewhere along the way, I met a “cousin” online who is descended from John’s first wife, Mary Bennett. The cousin sent me a lot of info, although none with sources. That was ok, because at least now I had a place to start looking. According to the cousin’s info, John deserted his first wife and their children. Mary later divorced him, and he remarried another lady, who he also later abandoned. The cousin told me that she thought he had probably run off to Wyoming, where some of his brothers lived, and died there.

Well, my second great-grandfather sounds like a low-life scoundrel, don’t you think? That’s pretty much how I’ve thought of him all this time. Not one of my favorite ancestors, but I still had to find him.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I discovered that Family Search Labs had added the index to Texas Deaths, 1890-1976. A shot in the dark, but I typed John’s name into the search box, and… there he was! He died in Hays County, Texas in 1939! Not in Wyoming, but right here in Texas!

So I sent an email to the San Marcos Public Library in Hays County, in hopes that maybe they had some old newspapers stashed away, maybe an obituary could be located. Sandra at the library wrote back almost immediately and promised to look for the obituary. In couple of days, she contacted me again to get my “snail-mail” address, to send me a copy of the obit. At this point I was expecting little more than a cursory few sentences about John Spurgeon Carroll, maybe a note about where he was buried. I was hoping against hope that his wife might be also be mentioned, since I have not been able to find her after 1900 either. Remember, he was a scoundrel, and nobody cares much about scoundrels…

So when I got home from work last night, I found a letter from the San Marcos Public library in my mailbox. Getting a bit excited now, although still not expecting much. I sat down at my desk and opened the letter and…WOW!

John S Carroll obituary

What an incredible wealth of information! Names, dates, places, the works! Even the fate of my second great-grandmother, Mary Carroll!

And the Mayflower! If this holds up…I can’t think of anything more exciting than having an ancestor aboard the Mayflower! Of course, I have to track all of these folks down and verify the relationships first.

The obit mentions that John was related to a B H Carroll, who was a moving force in the early Baptist Church in Texas. In Fort Worth, just about 2 blocks from where my grandmother used to live and the home that my Mom and her siblings grew up in is what was once an elementary school. As children, my brothers and I, while not actually attending that school, never-the-less did go there frequently to play on the playground. The name of the school? B H Carroll Elementary School! Is this the same B H Carroll as mentioned in the obit and at one time head of Baylor University in Waco, Texas and founder of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth? His son, B H Carroll, Jr, apparently. B H Carroll, Jr was once the superintendent of the Tarrant County School District, hence the name of the school.

The obit also states that John Spurgeon Carroll is buried in Martin Cemetery in Goforth, Texas. A quick Google search took me to the Hays County, TX GenWeb site and Martin Cemetery. And look what I found:

J S Carroll headstone

I am in hog heaven! It is definitely Happy Dance Time! Of course, I still have a lot of work to do to verify and document all of the information in the obituary, but….WOW! (All this at 2 AM and I still had to get to sleep and be back at work at 8:30 AM that morning!)