I recently starting playing around with Family Search’s experimental full-text search. It’s pretty amazing and incredibly useful. Especially for an unusual surname, such as Bembry. Of course, many of the hits that come up are documents that I have already seen via old-fashioned scrolling through deed indexes and so on. But even in that case, instances have popped up of my ancestors witnessing deeds, which of course would not appear in a grantor/grantee index.
Recently, some Florida court records have also come online. As any genealogist knows, court records can be a gold mine, but OMG are they tedious to search! Very few record books have been indexed in the modern era, and most are lacking even the handwritten indexes produced by patient court clerks in the 19th century. The only real way to search court records has been to flip through them, page by page, either in a courthouse or online.
Among the first items to pop up in the Florida court records was a mention of my 3rd great-grandmother, Sarah Ann Simpson Bembry, and her mother, my 4th great-grandmother, Dolly Tillman Simpson, on a Hamilton County list of families of Confederate soldiers along with their financial status.
This record told me several things. For Sarah Ann, it confirmed ages for her children, including John Bembry, my 2nd great-grandfather, and also confirmed that Rhody was Sarah’s daughter. I had doubted that fact because on the 1870 census she is listed as being 12 years old, yet she does not appear on the 1860 census. I thought perhaps she was a relative that had been “taken in” between 1860 and 1870. It’s now clear that the census taker simply had her age wrong in 1870: she was two and a half in 1864, and was therefore born in 1862.
For the widowed Dolly, living next door to her only daughter, Sarah Ann, the list confirmed the ages of her children and more importantly, confirmed that her sons Moses and Elijah (listed elsewhere as “Elijah M Simpson”) were two separate people! Elijah M appears on the 1850 census, while Moses does not. Meanwhile, Moses appears in 1860 while Elijah M does not. I had therefore concluded that they were the same person, However, Dolly certainly knew who her children were, and cites both names on both this list and an earlier one in 1863.
This list also tells a story. I already knew that Dolly had lost two of her nine sons in the war, now I know she actually lost at least three. I just can’t imagine how awful this would have been. However, this list shows that she wasn’t even fully aware of which sons she had lost.
Moses served with the Georgia 51st Infantry and died in May 1863 at Chancellorsville at about age 26. Aaron served with the 5th Florida Infantry, along with Thomas N Bembry, Sarah’s husband, and died in December of 1862 in Richmond, at about age 27, of smallpox complicated by pneumonia.
However, Peter, who also served with the 5th Florida, survived the war, living until 1921. He deserted from a hospital in Florida some time in 1864 and skedaddled all the way to Bledsoe County, Tennessee, where he raised a large family, naming his first daughter Dolly, born in 1868, after his mother. I wonder if Dolly ever found out that he actually survived, or where he went? She died between 1864 and 1870, so it’s entirely possible that she never knew.
Finally, Elijah M, another soldier of the 5th Florida, who Dolly thought was “wounded and in the hands of the Enemy” had actually died months before the list was made. His military file simply says that he was “supposed to have been mortally wounded at Gettysburg” in July, 1863. He would have been about 28, and must have been one of the many nameless soldiers that were buried in mass graves after the bloody battle.
All that is depressing enough, but the list also confirms that both Sarah Ann and Dolly were considered to be “most needy.” I already knew that both families were poor tenant farmers, but just imagine how poor “most needy” would have been in a backwoods Florida county in the middle of the Civil War. Especially with all the adult men gone, the situation was truly dire for these struggling mothers.
It was just a mess, wasn’t it. My family has come a long, long way since those terrible times. Now, let’s not ever do that again.
A Long Way to Tennessee 