1,000 Words

I read a quote yesterday that boggled my mind. According to the now defunct 1000memories website, every two minutes we take as many photos today as all of humanity took during the entire 19th century. 

Photography became popular and accessible to many during the Civil War. Letters to soldiers usually included a request for a portrait which the soldiers usually complied. These photos were treasures, the next best things to having the real person back at home with their loved ones.  

And those photos are even more precious today because they are hard to find. I have been blessed to have some photographs from the late 19th and early 20th century but I want more.  

Yes, I love a good story. I have been fascinated by the written word from the moment my father walked me, a precocious seven year old, to the local library branch to get my first library card. Yet, I must concur that a picture is worth a 1,000 words. Stories of long-gone ancestors are wonderful but a photo is glorious. Looking into the eyes of a past ancestors and relatives, marking their stance and demeanor, observing the details of fashions from another era, takes one's perception of those individuals to a level not obtained by mere vital statistics. For me, old photos are time machines that captures the past where words may fail. 

So I hunt for old photographs, beg relatives who profess to hoard them, take as many photos as I can for future generations. And I share. Because not only do we take more photos now than ever, we have the technology to scan and post our treasures for all to see.

Columbus and Narcissa Alexanders, my paternal great grandparents

Fred and Posie Warren, my maternal grandparents

Solomon Koonce, born 1826, and family. He is my 3 x great-grandfather on my mother's side

Narcissa Wallace Alexander, my paternal great grandmother

Narcissa's mother, Cinderella Wallace

My maternal great grandmother Lizzie Brassfield Koonce and her sister Cora Brassfield.

Grains of Truth

In 2013 I confirmed an oral legend I had recently learned about my paternal great great grandfather. Up until 2009 my family had never heard about our ancestor John Alexander being in the civil war. I was skeptical even after I found a John Alexander on the roster of U.S. Colored Troops out of Mississippi. After all, John Alexander was a common name. I found dozens of them serving in the war. For that reason, I did not send for the pension papers. It was a lot of money to spend to find out it was the wrong man. I decided to go in person. I justified the expenditure as a trip for business and for fun.

It turned out that the pension papers were for my relatives and it gave me more details about John's life. However, it did not give me the name of his slave holder. That was left blank. I had to deduce who it might be from other evidence. I concluded that the slave holder had been a Huffman. This was also the man my aunt always thought was the slave holder.

Since 2013 I haven't done much more research on John Alexander but I think the ancestors have been nudging me this week. Yesterday I decided to look into John Huffman born in 1801 in Alexandria, Virginia and died in 1882 in Lincoln County, Mississippi.  In 1870, Huffman lived in the same neighborhood as John Alexander. This is one of the clues I have been told to look for when trying to find the slave holder. I looked at Huffman's family tree. Huffman was married to Mary Glass. Her parents were Frederick Mason Glass and Elizabeth Strother. When I saw this I got very excited. You see, according to another oral legend, John Alexander lived on a plantation in Virginia called Strouder. Some of my cousins have told me that "Strawder" was his nickname. Am I on the right trail?

I was still skeptical. Glass and Strother married and lived in Georgia. Georgia was never part of any oral history for Alexander. However,  I was able to find a family tree on ancestry.com for the Glass family. It gave me Mary's ancestry. Her grandfather was William Strouther, born in 1755 and died in 1833 in Virginia. He was living in Fauquier County when he died. Fauquier is adjacent to Rappahannock County, where John Alexander claimed he was born!

I definitely think I'm on the right trail now. It also makes me curious as to whether all the oral legends I have heard have a grain of truth. My to-do list has just gotten longer.

How Far Back Can I Go?

(Prologue -Tapestry of Tangled Ties)

That is the question everyone interested in genealogy ask. It is my desire to go back as far as Africa. I probably need a genie in a bottle to complete that quest. As a Black American, my ancestry is hidden from me in a way that is not hidden from other Americans. Since my ancestors were slaves, their names were not on the census before 1870. It is not impossible to go back farther if I can identify the slave owners but that is difficult too. Many slaves wanted to distance themselves from their lives as property. They changed their names. They didn’t talk much about that time with their innocent descendants. White descendants of slave owners are also unwilling to share that part of their family history.

However, once the slave owners are identified, it is possible to find records on file because slaves were part of a financial transaction, as heinous as that is. I have the receipt of the purchase of my great-great-great grandfather Solomon Koonce who was sold to Isaac Koonce of Haywood County, Tennessee in January 1840..  I have also deducted that Solomon was owned for a period of time by Francis Nunn who died intestate in Lauderdale County, Tennessee around 1837.

I may be in the minority but I am also interested in my White ancestors. I am the sum of all of my parts. In looking for those ancestors I am learning more about my country’s history and psyche. That is also part of my history—slavery, the Civil War, the American Revolutionary War, the making of a nation. I plan on studying that too, to put my history into the larger context.

I can go back much farther on some of my white ancestors. So far I am able to go back at least 12 generations. I have found the link between me and one of my favorite writers, Jane Austen and even closer, the link between my family and Reba McEntire. This is exciting to me. I am not ashamed at embracing all my of heritage because I do not deny my ancestry regardless of color or nationality.

This is what I attempt to do in updating my family history. The surnames that I will be following are Koonce, Warren, Featherston, Cotten, Alexander, Brassfield,  Tarpley, Elmore, Alexander, Saunders, and Wright. There may be more as I learn more. I will also research the locations where they lived--Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi and maybe others as I learn of them. Hopefully, one of those locations will be somewhere specific on the continent of Africa.

John Alexander, Civil War Veteran

My paternal great great grandfather John Alexander  enlisted at the end of the Civil War in February, 1865 at New Orleans, Louisiana.  I am trying to find out what happened at that particular time that allowed him to do so. Up until then he was a slave. 

John was first mustered into Company G 77^th Infantry USCT in March, 1865 and then Company K 10^th Heavy Artillery USCT, October, 1865. He served until he was mustered out in February, 1867,  his troop being the last to be mustered out in the Civil War. 

He applied for an invalid pension in 1890. According to his Civil War pension applications, he was run over by a wagon while he was unloading vessels on Ship Island, Mississippi. The injury to his hip and ankle caused him to limp for the rest of his life. 

I wanted to know more about his life during the war so I did a little research on Ship Island. Ship Island was a stretch of land twelve miles off the coast Mississippi in the Gulf of Mexico. The Island has since been halved because of  Hurricane Katrina.

My initial information comes from James Hollandsworth Jr. and the Mississippi History Now website. 

At the beginning of the War, Ship Island was considered a desirable piece of geography because of its proximity to Texas, Mobile, Alabama and New Orleans.  The Confederates evacuated it in 1861 and the Union held it to the end of the war. When New Orleans fell in 1862 to the Union, the garrison on Ship Island was reduced to one regiment of infantry, the 13th Maine. In December, 1862, eight companies of this regiment were transferred to other forts, leaving just two companies. On January 12, 1863, seven companies from a new regiment of Colored Troops, the 2nd Louisiana Native Guards, joined them. Unfortunately, this mixture of black and white troops was an explosive one, and within a week racial tension broke out into disputes between the men from Maine and the black soldiers from Louisiana. The two companies of white soldiers were withdrawn and the 2nd Louisiana Native Guards remained as the primary garrison for Ship Island until the end of the war.

Sunday April, 14, 2013,  the 150th anniversary of the 2nd Regiment, Louisiana Native Guards' successful assault on a confederate naval base at Pascagoula, Mississippi will be commemorated on Ship Island. 

The island once “considered the most healthy place on the Coast & would be a good place to establish a general hospital,” changed after the white troops left. An officer with the Sanitary Commission wrote an unfavorable report of the health conditions on the island and ended it with a remarkably understated conclusion.

“The wretched condition of Ship Island, a barren, desolate sand-spit, left free for the most part to alligators and such reptiles as abound in the swamps and lagoons of that region; the painful and variable climate; the sufferings of the men from diarrhea, influenza, and rheumatism; the badness of the food, which was of salt meat (no fresh meat being issued); the badness of the water, and the wretched system of cooking, made the presence of the Sanitary Commission not undesirable.”

Ship Island was used as a prison and detention center almost from the beginning. The first civilian detainees there from New Orleans were sent there in June 1862. Ship Island was also a prison for Union soldiers convicted of serious crimes. Confederate prisoners, more than 1,200 Confederate captives from New Orleans, arrived October 1864, The number of Confederates on Ship Island peaked in April 1865 when 3,000 prisoners taken with the capture of Mobile arrived. This would have been during the time that John was there. By May, all of the prisoners of war were sent to Vicksburg, Mississippi to be exchanged for Union soldiers. By June 8, 1865, there were no prisoners — Confederate, Union, or civilian — left on the island. 

I’m not sure how long John stayed on the Island. He was transferred to the 10^th Heavy Artillery in October, based in New Orleans, until he was mustered out.