"I've a whale of a tale to tell you, lads ." - Ned Land
Ok, Ol' Br'er won't leave you hanging on that quote. A body has to be both older and have a penchant for foolish trivia to know that one. Or curious enough to research it.
Tell you what. Br'er will pause writing here to allow you to try finding the quote source before continuing.
Pause over. Did you find it? No? Ned Land is a character in Disney's 1954 film, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, played by Kirk Douglas. The line was part of a song - Yes! Kirk Douglas sang in the role! - Ned sings to his shipmates.
Anyways, back to the story.
Ol' Br'er has been silent for a long time for good reasons. Mainly, his body tried to kill him. Ok, his body betrayed him making life hell and typing extremely painful and virtually impossible. Walking was beyond difficult, and dangerous as he was prone to falling with every step. And, he did fall several times over the past few months. Fortunately, the only real injuries from those falls were to his pride. Walking across the room was difficult and risky. Galivanting in graveyards was utterly and absolutely out of the question. He is a couple of months past corrective surgery and doing much better, though has a long road to recovery ahead of him.
That is all just to explain the long silence to anyone who may be following his antics.
Well, he is back!
Recently, feeling up to spending some time behind the keyboard, he did a bit of virtual cemetery creeping whilst researching a distant branch of the family tree.
Many people have researched Ol' Br'er's family, and they have published their work. Being the distrustful curmudgeon he is, Ol' Be'er never trusts anyone else's work, instead insisting on verifying everything himself.
One 2nd Great-Granduncle's line showed him having at least 12 children with two wives, the surnames of whom no one knew. So Ol' Br'er set about seeing if he could, using modern tools and resources, suss out those names.
Things soon took an unexpected turn!
Some of the resources that popped up were for someone not appearing in Br'er's own prior research nor in anything anyone else has ever shared. Intriguing!
Ok. Let's name some players and set the stage so that the story can be followed and make some semblance of sense.
JDG (1828 - 1910)- Br'er's 2nd GGU and our starting point.
NL? (1834 - ca. 1864-5)- JDG's first wife
E? (1835 - aft. 1910) - JDG's second wife
Ok. E?'s maiden name was fairly easy to find. There is a marriage record for JDG and EM in 1866. So E? is EM. And, NL? had to have died (or there have been a divorce) before that marriage in 1866. But what was NL?'s maiden name?
During Ol' Br'er's research, a new person with the same surname as JDG, MBG (b. 1864), showed up. MBG has never appeared in any family tree for JDG. But his birth, and location, mean that he could be related to JDG in some way. More research was clearly called for!
Since MBG did not readily fit anywhere in Ol' Br'er's tree, the only thing to do was build a separate tree starting with MBG and see where it lead. So that is what Ol' Br'er did.
It was not possible to start researching MBG as a child because he never showed up in any census in a family with the same surname! The earliest records immediately available had him living in the household of WC. Odd. Tracking forward and back through the years, MBG lived almost exclusively in WC's household. Even after marrying and having children of his own, MBG and his family remained living with WC. Eventually, MBG could be found in the 1870 census, age 6, in the household of NC, a widow. WC is in that same household and NC appears to be his mother given their ages.
But why is MBG in the C family household?
Ol' Br'er was getting frustrated, but not daunted! He set off building a tree for NC and her son, WC, to see where that might lead and what it might reveal. That was the key to unlocking the mystery!
See, WC never married or had children of his own, but he left a detailed will. He left his entire estate to his sister, PC, for the remainder of her life. After her death, the estate was to be divided equally among a litany of great-nieces and great-nephews, all with the same surname as MBG, and, lastly with his nephew, MBG! Well, damn! That answers multiple questions, not the least of which was: What is NL?'s surname? C! NL? was NLC before marrying JDG!
But that would mean MBG is NLC's and JDG's son, born about the same time she died. That narrows her death down to between mid-1864 when MBG was born, and mid-1866 when JDG married EM.
While that addressed the missing surnames, and how MBG was related to WC, it did not answer the burning question as to why MBG never once appeared in his father's household. That mystery seemed destined to go unanswered.
Ol' Br'er, being the imaginative type he is, envisioned two possible stories. One, NLC died in or shortly after giving birth to MBG. JDG, heartbroken and grieving, could not bear to look upon the child and sent it to live with his mother's family. The second, more bleak, that EM, the new bride, would not abide the infant of the woman whose place she just took, and forced her new husband to ship the child off.
It seemed that the story was to end there. Except that Ol' Br'er has tree-tracing, grave-galivanting compatriots who love a good story as much or more as he does. And he could not resist the opportunity to do a little bragging about how he had sussed out the wives' surnames and MBG's place in the family tree.
This was his undoing.
After he related the whole saga to them, one asked a question and posed a third possible alternative to MBG's story: Did JDG serve in the war? It might well be that JDG was not MBG's father!
SON OF A BITCH!
Ol' Br'er turned back to his records for JDG. Sure enough, he served in the Confederacy. He was one of the many who surrendered at Vicksburg on 4 July 1863. He was also wounded at Atlanta in August of 1864. And, lastly, he mustered out in August of 1865 in North Carolina. Hmm. MBG was born in late July 1864. That meant he had to have been conceived sometime around November of 1863.
All this means that for JDG to be MBG's father, he had to have made his way from Vicksburg, Mississippi to Walton County, Georgia starting no sooner than 3 July 1863 (during a war, and with no real support), spent enough time with NLC to conceive MBG. That would be no small feat under the circumstances!
Now, if that was not feasible (and it would be on the low end of that scale!), then there is a third possibility: JDG came home after the war to find a 'son' that he could not possibly have conceived. Perhaps NLC was alive when he returned in 1865, perhaps not. There is no way to know. Perhaps she died in or shortly after childbirth in 1864. Perhaps she took her own life, unable to face the disgrace of her affair (or rape?) and illegitimate child. Perhaps JDG came home and killed her in a rage over her infidelity. Whatever the truth of his conception, it is entirely possible that MBG was not the biological son of JDG, even though he used that surname his entire life.
And this third possibility would more than align with MBG never living in JDG's household. As well as his effectively being adopted by NLC's brother.
Talk about ignominy! Not MBG possibly being the result of an affair, no. The ignominy was Ol' Br'er's in utterly and absolutely missing this probability. His research buddies took no small degree of delight in being the ones to catch his grievous error.
