Your scrapblog editor was rummaging around for old photos of dear old Dad, Uncle Bill to you cousins, on Sunday, which would have been his 83rd birthday, when she ran into something that dropped her perfectly square Sprick-Miller jaw. In the back of two old notebooks of Miller family history, she found Dad's family tree, complete with vignettes about his foreb
ears going back to the Revolutionary War and beyond to Scotland. There was a lot of fascinating stuff, but this took the cake:
Noah, Zachary, Mo, H.B. and Elizabeth, here's a tidbit for you in case you have to write a history paper or watch video historian Ken Burns' masterpiece "The Civil War" (available from Auntie Pam's lending library):
Your paternal great-great- great-great-grandpa was a Confederate infantryman who died in the Civil War. Here's how this unfortunate fella, John Madison Jackson, is connected to you: He was the father of John Hamilton Jackson, who was the father of Millie Ward Jackson, who was the mother of Mamie Louella Jackson, who was the mother of William Alton Miller, aka Pipe Grandpa.
Here's his story: Joh
n Madison Jackson was born in the Beaver Island area of Stokes County, N.C., in 1823, the son of John Jackson and Nancy Dearing. In 1850, he married Julie Ann Richardson (1832-1895, daughter of John W. Richardson and Ruthy Gann). They had five children, the fourth of whom was your great-great-great-grandpa, John Hamilton Jackson (1859-1924).
On Feb. 12, 1863, at age 40, John Madison Jackson, then a farmer in Stokes County, enlisted in Company G, 22nd Regiment of the North Carolina infantry of the Confederate army. On May 28 or 31, 1864, he was captured by the Union army in or near Mechanicsville, Va., and imprisoned at Point Lookout, Md., a huge, overcrowded, fetid Union prison camp (now a state park; you can Google it for gruesome details) where he died of wounds and/or disease and/or starvation on June 27, 1864. It is not known where he was buried.
It's quite possible he was captured and doomed in one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, Cold Harbor, which happened at that time near Mechanicsville. I Googled that battle and found many, many grisly Matthew Brady photos from it. Below is a painting of that battle that sanitizes it a little:
It's one of the strange truths of American history that many U.S. families are descended from people who fought on different sides in the Civil War. Not so in our case, since our maternal Spricks and Augustines, who would have indeed been Yankees had they been here, cleverly arrived in what they called Amerika after the gory Civil War and before the great wars of the 20th century that wiped out whole generations and populations in Europe. Still, it's eerie to know the Miller cousins are descended from such disparate quarters.
Every cousin, bio or adopted, has an intriguing family history, somewhere back there. Usually such things are obscured in the mists of time, which may be just as well. The main thing is, if you go back far enough, all of us, bio or adopted, are blood cousins.
Your scrapblog editor was rummaging around for old photos of dear old Dad, Uncle Bill to you cousins, on Sunday, which would have been his 83rd birthday, when she ran into something that dropped her perfectly square Sprick-Miller jaw. In the back of two old notebooks of Miller family history, she found Dad's family tree, complete with vignettes about his foreb
ears going back to the Revolutionary War and beyond to Scotland. There was a lot of fascinating stuff, but this took the cake:
Noah, Zachary, Mo, H.B. and Elizabeth, here's a tidbit for you in case you have to write a history paper or watch video historian Ken Burns' masterpiece "The Civil War" (available from Auntie Pam's lending library): Your paternal great-great- great-great-grandpa was a Confederate infantryman who died in the Civil War. Here's how this unfortunate fella, John Madison Jackson, is connected to you: He was the father of John Hamilton Jackson, who was the father of Millie Ward Jackson, who was the mother of Mamie Louella Jackson, who was the mother of William Alton Miller, aka Pipe Grandpa.
Here's his story: Joh
n Madison Jackson was born in the Beaver Island area of Stokes County, N.C., in 1823, the son of John Jackson and Nancy Dearing. In 1850, he married Julie Ann Richardson (1832-1895, daughter of John W. Richardson and Ruthy Gann). They had five children, the fourth of whom was your great-great-great-grandpa, John Hamilton Jackson (1859-1924).
On Feb. 12, 1863, at age 40, John Madison Jackson, then a farmer in Stokes County, enlisted in Company G, 22nd Regiment of the North Carolina infantry of the Confederate army. On May 28 or 31, 1864, he was captured by the Union army in or near Mechanicsville, Va., and imprisoned at Point Lookout, Md., a huge, overcrowded, fetid Union prison camp (now a state park; you can Google it for gruesome details) where he died of wounds and/or disease and/or starvation on June 27, 1864. It is not known where he was buried.
It's quite possible he was captured and doomed in one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, Cold Harbor, which happened at that time near Mechanicsville. I Googled that battle and found many, many grisly Matthew Brady photos from it. Below is a painting of that battle that sanitizes it a little:
It's one of the strange truths of American history that many U.S. families are descended from people who fought on different sides in the Civil War. Not so in our case, since our maternal Spricks and Augustines, who would have indeed been Yankees had they been here, cleverly arrived in what they called Amerika after the gory Civil War and before the great wars of the 20th century that wiped out whole generations and populations in Europe. Still, it's eerie to know the Miller cousins are descended from such disparate quarters.
Every cousin, bio or adopted, has an intriguing family history, somewhere back there. Usually such things are obscured in the mists of time, which may be just as well. The main thing is, if you go back far enough, all of us, bio or adopted, are blood cousins.
1 comment:
I was just looking up my family tree and was directed to your blog. It seems we have a common ancestor- John Hamilton Jackson. My great-grandfather was Grover Cleveland, Mamie's brother. Its good to see others passing along the past.
Chris Rushing
Dayton, Ohio
familyrush@woh.rr.com
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