Genealogy is addicting. When we began to unearth the family history a flurry of emails and phone calls created more links and got more people involved. Each new discovery cleared the way for a new question or theory about past events. Some of the answers are coming together. It's amazing how those answers touch on much more current events, circles are completed, and those long ago events actually become part of the current generation's memories. Time Travel....in an RV!
My great-great grandfather and his brother were two of the engineers who planned the trenches laid in the Vicksburg battlefield. We walked there yesterday morning, a day much like during the siege 150 years ago, getting warmer, muggier as the sun rose. However, we wore cotton clothes, high-tech tennies, sun screen and insect repellent as we walked between sun and shade. An hour in we got in the car, cranked up the A/C and came home for showers and lunch. Great-great grandfather MS Hasie wore a wool uniform and crummy shoes, stayed in battle for 2 months, had no trees for shade, ate what the army gave him and when possible, snuck off to see the beautiful southern girl he had met when a battle skirted near her plantation(the home was used as a hospital, like so many were) a few miles away. His experience of Vicksburg was beyond anything we can really imagine, and his team won! The poor Confederates had no relief from the elements or 2 months of starvation that eventually cost them the city and the war.
For the last 2 days I have been working through archives with the current good folks in Vicksburg, reminiscent of sitting in Texas courthouses while Dad ran title searches for lease property for Humble Oil(more summer days with no air conditioning). We found death certificates from 1878, but no bodies in the cemetery. I then found those same names on census roles in Dallas in 1900. Conflicting, yes, but proof of family lore that they escaped the city quarantine during the yellow fever epidemic. These were hardy folks!
The intrigue continues, bones rattle, and secrets are revealed. But I won't go on any more here, i have work to do on Ancestry.com!
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