Category Archives: Genealogy

The Trees

Posted on October 6, 2008 | Comments Off on The Trees

You mought find it curious, I’ll warrant, that the dialect Yankees have always associated with hillbillies, crackers and rednecks, in fact originated in their own neck of the woods. And so Conrad Richter delivers it in The Trees, the first (1941) book in his Awakening Land triology.

It’s the memorable story of Worth and Jary Luckett, and their spirited children, especially daughter Sayward, woodsies all, who pull up stakes and leave behind their puncheon-floor cabin in 1780s Pennsylvania, treking single-file into the virgin forests of the Ohio Valley to start anew.

Their "early, vigorous spoken language," Richter notes in his foreward, "contrary to public belief, had its considerable origin in the Northeastern states, whence it was carried by emigrants into pioneer Ohio and adjoining territories, where today it has largely disappeared, and along with the Pennsylvania rifle, into the South and Southwest, where it has more widely survived…"

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Posted in Genealogy, Library, Texana

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Stanley genealogy

Posted on June 6, 2008 | Comments Off on Stanley genealogy

Most Stanleys, especially the Southern variety, sooner or later get around to trying to connect themselves to the famous lords and ladies of Shakespeare and English history. My father did, though never very convincingly. In the ancestor hunt, you’re supposed to start in the present and work backwards, not pick a famous somebody in the past and try to trace their descendents forward to you. "Over 80% of Stanleys known to have emigrated to America were transported there as convicts," concludes Nigel Stanley, author of a British genealogy site I’ve been following for several years, who has finally gotten around to a section on Stanley migration to the USA. "Stanley was a common surname amongst the ordinary and poorer classes of the population." Realism, especially in genealogy, is good. Ancestor digging helps you locate yourself in time, demonstrates your potential genetic resources and proves that your life is not an accident. But ancestor worship is going too far.

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Posted in Genealogy, Mr. Boy, Rancho Roly Poly

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Temple Beth El

Posted on April 1, 2008 | Comments Off on Temple Beth El

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This is one of the oldest synagogues in Mississippi, dedicated in 1905 in my father’s hometown of Lexington, in the hills on the edge of the Delta. There were never more than eighty in the congregation, and the rabbis always drove in from Vicksburg or elsewhere. But, like the ark, symbolized by the handles (or horns) up there on the sanctuary’s roofline, the believers have remained steadfast. There’s talk now–as the Jewish population has dwindled–of moving the building to Ole Miss, but I wonder if that wouldn’t be a mistake. Could be there’s still some draw left in the place, and the population will rise again.

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Posted in Genealogy, Rancho Roly Poly, Scribbles

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Grandmother’s house

Posted on March 14, 2008 | Comments Off on Grandmother’s house

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I suppose it was inevitable. Neglect to buy your grandmother’s 100-year-old house in Mississippi and someone else will turn it into a business–or, in this case, a government-funded rehab center for the emotionally-disturbed. Hence the added railing on the front porch and the wheelchair access ramp there on the left. But since my late father, who was said to have been born in the front bedroom on the left-hand side, didn’t see any need to keep it, I couldn’t decide why I should. Sentiment inevitably collides with money, I suppose, especially when the sentimental aren’t rich to begin with.

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Posted in Genealogy, Rancho Roly Poly

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Col. Christopher Claudius Pegues, C.S.A.

Posted on January 10, 2008 | 2 comments

 

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As promised, my great, great grandmother’s brother, who was captain of the volunteer Cahawba Rifles, 1861; colonel of the Fifth Alabama Infantry Regiment, 1862; fatally wounded leading the regiment in a charge at Gaines Mill, VA, May, 1862; died at Richmond, July 15; and buried in Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond. 

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Posted in Civil War, Genealogy

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5th Alabama Infantry Regiment

Posted on January 5, 2008 | Comments Off on 5th Alabama Infantry Regiment

Enjoying Lynyrd Skynard’s 1975 “Sweet Home Alabama,” a rebuke of Canadian Neil Young’s critical 1970 “Southern Man.” Searching for the lyrics of each lead me to this site of the 5th Alabama Infantry Regiment and Band reenactment group. Which reminded me…

The history of the regiment includes my maternal great great grandmother’s brother, Christopher Claudius Pegues, who was the regiment’s commander at the  Seven Days’ battle of Gaines Mill, Virginia (also called First Cold Harbor) where he was mortally wounded leading a charge from the front.

Called Kit in the family, he was a lawyer from Cahawba, the state’s first capital (now a ghost town and state park), and an alcoholic who was his mother’s despair. After his death, he was just another hero-martyr of the bitter war, albeit one with his own ghost story. I photocopied his tintype at the state archives in 2003, enroute to my infantry OCS class’s first reunion at Fort Benning since our graduation in 1968. A reminder that I need to scan the photocopy and post it.

CORRECTION: After scanning the photocopy, I see that it is not a tintype but a photograph of a painting, probably done on wood, in the usual format of the day, i.e. the head carefully rendered from life but the costume so slapdash it is cartoonlike.

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Posted in Civil War, Genealogy

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Yay Us Day

Posted on November 11, 2007 | Comments Off on Yay Us Day

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Next year I’ll get something new, but for the second year in a row, I think this will do for Veterans Day–the seal/decal of my old OCS class and the various places we served in Vietnam. Also this, which takes me back to the American Revolution, on my mother’s side, to Thomas Farrar, a lieutenant colonel in the South Carolina "line" of the Continental Army, and Claudius Pegues, Jr., a captain in the South Carolina militia. I suspect our military service goes back much farther, but I don’t know anything about it. And, while we’re at it, let’s not forget the wannabees, who are sure to be strutting around today in their phony uniforms. No sweat. Let them play, if it makes them feel any better.

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Posted in Genealogy, Infantry OCS, Rancho Roly Poly, Troops, Viet Nam

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