If It Wasn't For Bad Luck

 

I was always curious about the history of my dad’s family.  Growing up, my father was reticent when I would ask him basic questions like, “What church did you go to when you were growing up?” or “Where does your family come from?”  These questions seemed basic to me, because on my mother’s side, the answers were obvious:  her family was German, and they belonged to the E&R church (Evangelical & Reformed, a German Protestant denomination). Ever the detective, I deduced from Dad’s food tastes that he had grown up with Southern influences, but that was the extent of my knowledge. Dad did joke about being a Southern Illinois hillbilly, and once in a while made reference to his mother’s side of the family being part Indian. That was the extent of our knowledge.

In the 1970’s, my father’s (paternal) Aunt Mary began researching the family’s roots. She knew very little, because she, too, had not been told much. Her family had come from Union County in Southern Illinois, a rural county, known for its rolling hills and orchards. Her mother’s family were Rendlemans, some of the original settlers, but she knew next to nothing about the Underwoods.  Slowly, bit by bit, she began working her way up the family tree. She was able to uncover a remarkable amount of information, all done by means of the slow process of visiting libraries and mailing inquiries to county, state and federal record centers. The story she uncovered was one typical of many American families, eking out a rough existence on what was then the frontier, enduring many hardships along the way.  But it is a story worth telling, if only to illustrate that often overlooked aspect of American history: the history of the poor. Before she died she published her findings in a small book, and although I don’t share her desire to wrap myself in the flag and join the DAR, I agree with most of her conclusions, a few overlooked details notwithstanding.

Her own family had known its share of misfortune. Her parents, Daniel Webster Underwood, Jr., and Sarah Jane Rendleman, had married late – both were in their thirties.  They quickly made up for lost time, and produced a family of seven children, two boys and five girls. My grandfather, Aaron Reed, was the eldest; Mary was the second youngest. Daniel Jr. worked for the Mobile & Ohio Railroad, and by the time Mary was born, the family had moved from the tiny hamlet of Alto Pass to the town of Murphysboro.  It was while her father, Daniel Jr, was working in Murphysboro that he suffered a serious injury to his hand. While coupling cars, his hand was crushed, and as a result of that accident, he lost three fingers and half of his hand.  Thus disabled, he was no longer useful to the railroad, so he returned to the only other occupation he knew, farming.  Turns out his disability kept him from being able to do much around the farm either, so he had to rely on his oldest son, Reed, for the bulk of the farm work.  Reed was only about twelve at the time.  One day a team of horses Reed was driving took fright and stampeded back to the barn, narrowly missing three of the youngest girls, who had been playing in the dirt nearby and were saved only by the quick action of the other son, Webb, who snatched them out of the way and threw them up on the porch seconds before being trampled. The runaway team of horses made for the barn, but ran smack into one of the support beams, bringing the entire structure down on top of them.  Just another day in the bucolic life of a farmer. It was sometime after this that Daniel was re-hired by the railroad to do office work, and the family moved up to East Saint Louis.  

When Aunt Mary began researching her Underwood ancestors, her parents had both been dead for many years. She knew that her father had been raised mostly by his grandmother, and that his father had died as a prisoner of war at Andersonville Prison in Georgia.  Her father had told her that his ancestors had come from the British Isles in the early 17^th century. She vaguely remembered the names of her father’s sisters, because they were such pretty names, and when she heard them as a child, she had made up a little sing-song to remember them. But that was about it. So she started with census records, from which she was able to deduce all of her grandfather’s siblings and parents. She confirmed that her grandfather, Daniel Webster Underwood, had indeed died at Andersonville prison, and she sent for his service and pension records. When she received his service record in the mail, someone had scrawled upon it, “Your ancestor was a deserter.”

My great-great-grandfather was part of the 109^th Illinois Regiment. These Southern Illinois boys, most of them, had been born in the South.  Many of them had come to Illinois during the 1830’s or 1840’s from Tennessee, Virginia and the Carolinas.  They weren’t slave owners, too poor for that, but they weren’t abolitionists by any means, nor were they keen on enlisting to fight against cousins who remained in the South. The National Guard had been brought in to other counties to enforce the draft, so reluctantly they enlisted in the Union infantry. The story of the 109^th regiment deserves its own post, so I will only provide the Readers’ Digest version here.  At Holly Springs, Mississippi, the regiment was guarding the rail station and failed to come to the defense of the town when Confederate troops under Van Dorn sacked it. The officers of the regiment were arrested and stripped of command, and the rank and file were charged with desertion, Daniel and his brothers among them. After returning to Memphis, it was determined that the rank and file were loyal and good soldiers, so they were absorbed into the 11^th Regiment, with whom they marched to lay siege on Vicksburg. It was outside Vicksburg that brother John received a gunshot wound and Daniel was captured and sent to serve the remainder of the war at Andersonville Prison in Georgia.  There he died in the fall of 1864.

Daniel Sr was one of fourteen children, seven boys and seven girls.  Of the seven sons, each one of them was injured or disabled or dead before his time.  The eldest, Elijah, was killed by a train in 1853. One of the boys, Walter, had lost part of his arm in a sawmill accident. Four of the remaining boys signed up with the Union Army, and one had married and moved to Missouri and thus joined the Confederacy. Of the four who joined the Union Army, the youngest died of sickness, one was injured by gunshot wound which ended up disabling him and rendering him unable to work, one died a prisoner of war, and the other suffered a “nervous condition” (which I imagine today we might call PTSD). The son who joined the Confederacy moved to Arkansas after the war, and over 100 years later, the two branches of the family reunited.

Daniel’s widow, Susan Pippins Underwood, was left with a family to care for. She worked her own farm, and according to Aunt Mary, also worked on neighboring farms to support the family.  Her children were raised for the most part by her mother-in-law, Mary Ledbetter Underwood.  Susan died in her early fifties, worn out from a life of hard work, no doubt.  Aunt Mary noted that her application for her widow’s pension stated that she was paralyzed.  

Mary Ledbetter Underwood was the matriarch, and she endured her share of hardships. She outlived her husband, eight of her offspring, and raised many of her grandchildren. She was sixty when the Civil War began, and died at the age of ninety-two in 1894. She and her husband, Jesse, had begun their lives in the Carolinas.  Jesse was born in Buncombe County, NC, in the extreme western corner; Mary was born in the Pendleton district of SC, also in the extreme western corner.  Several years and several children after their marriage, sometime in the 1830’s, they moved west to what was then Roane County, TN.  It was while he was living in Tennessee, that Jesse was inspired by the religious revival that was taking place in the early 1800’s.  He became one of the founding members of the Cedar Fork Baptist church in what is today Philadelphia, TN. Then in the 1840’s he again moved his family west to Union County, Illinois. There he found the Mt. Tabor Baptist Church, and was its first preacher.  Jesse did not live to see the Civil War, however; he died in the early 1850’s.  I have not been able to determine his cause of death; I don’t believe Aunt Mary ever mentioned it.  I believe it was a farm accident, but cannot find the reference that makes me think that.

As I said, Aunt Mary did a thorough job of investigating the previous three generations of her Underwood family, but she hit a stumbling block when she tried to search for Jesse’s parents. Searching census records, she homed in on a William “Wedgebare” Underwood, who was a Revolutionary War veteran.  Unfortunately, although her instincts told her he was Jesse’s father, she was not able to find any documented proof.  She did find his 1824 application for his veteran’s pension, which stated that he suffered from rheumatism and could no longer work, and that he had a wife and several children still living at home.  However, his widow who applied for her own widow’s pension, was a later wife, and in her 1850’s application she made no mention of William’s previous marriage (or marriages).   This incensed Mary, because Jesse had to have been the product of a prior marriage, having been born in 1804.  She even titled her book, “Patriots, Their Footsteps Erased”! She had wanted so much to become a member of the DAR through her Underwood ancestor, but had no way of proving the connection.

It wasn’t until years after her death that some of the mystery of William was pieced together.  In the 1990’s my husband took a job in Charlotte, NC.  Knowing that ancestor Jesse had been born in North Carolina, I took advantage of the location to go to the library and do some research.  I searched for census records, seeking to duplicate some of the research Mary had done.  Mary had hypothesized that William had had two wives prior to Margaret Wilson, his final wife who applied for her widow’s pension.  One of these was named Annie. I found her in an 1810 census, head of a household of “free persons of color.” Mary had failed to mention that part.  William was at that time living with another wife, nameless, as were all family members before the 1850 census.  I had done some reading about the mountains of North Carolina, and it was not a farming area, but was populated mainly by Cherokee Indians and subsistence farmers during the early years of the nineteenth century.  I supposed Annie could have been Cherokee, but did that mean that she and he had divorced?  Were they ever married?  Was she his woman on the side? Could she have been his sister?  Not likely, because William had shown up as white. I filed it away.  I started poking around genealogy forums on AOL. I ran across a woman who worked in the Chattanooga library who had found some Cherokee applications from the early 1900’s of some Underwoods who lived in Georgia, and claimed that William “Wedgebare” Underwood and Annie Underwood were their parents. The librarian was descended from one of William’s sons, Enoch, and she graciously ran copies of the applications and mailed them to me.  Apparently in the early 1900’s there was land in Oklahoma that was given to people who could prove they were descended from the Cherokees.  All of these particular applications had been denied, because the Cherokee ancestors claimed by the applicants had not been on any of the Cherokee rolls taken back in the 1830’s (before the Trail of Tears). However, from these applications it was clear that William had had two wives before Margaret Wilson, Annie and a Polly Eastridge. Polly Eastridge was the mother of Jesse.  From all of this I deduced that there was some sort of Cherokee connection, but as the years went by no further information surfaced.   

In 2015 my sister and I decided to ask my brother if he would agree to take a DNA test.  We decided that he would be the best of us siblings to take it, since through him we could see the Y-DNA.  While we were waiting for his results to come through, my sister found the military size rolls showing where William had enlisted in the Continental Army. To her surprise, he was listed as a mulatto.  Shortly thereafter, my brother received his results, and lo and behold, his Y-haplogroup was African.  We discovered the research of Paul Heinegg, who published a book about free persons of color in early America.  He had hypothesized that William, and a brother, Lewis, were sons of a Christopher Underwood, also a free person of color. They lived in Culpeper County, VA, but moved to Wilkes County, NC, sometime before 1790.  The 1800 census found both of them in Wilkes County, listed as head of households of free persons of color. Sometime during the next decade, however, they split, Lewis remaining in Wilkes County, and William moving farther west in North Carolina.  From that point on, William always showed up as white on the census, as did all of his offspring.  I read that after the Revolution, it became increasingly difficult for free persons of color in Virginia, so that may explain why the brothers moved to North Carolina.  There was a small community of free persons of color living in Wilkes County, but William apparently chose to move further west to live among the Cherokees.  To this day I do not know whether his wife Annie was actually a Cherokee, or if perhaps she also was of African heritage.  I do know none of us has any indigenous DNA, nor do any of our distant cousins. 

Unfortunately for William and his children, gold was discovered in “them thar hills”, so it became unacceptable to Congress that these lands should remain in the hands of the Indians. Thus began the push to remove the Cherokees, which ended in the disgraceful Trail of Tears.  It was during this time, the 1830’s, that Jesse took his family and moved to eastern Tennessee.  His father and most of his other siblings moved to northern Georgia. Daniel Webster was a strong advocate for the Cherokees.  Jesse named a son Daniel Webster Underwood, so there definitely was a sympathy for the Cherokees, if not a biological connection. 

There is still much that we do not know about William, and I will go into more detail about his life in a future post, but the picture that emerges from the story of these generations is one of a family beat down by the struggle for the creation of this country: starting out as slaves, perhaps; fighting in the Revolution; fleeing an increasingly unfriendly Virginia; fleeing what became a hostile North Carolina; being inspired by the religious revival of the early 1800’s; seeking a better life in Illinois; suffering the hardship of life on the frontier; being torn apart by the Civil War; being caught up in the railroad boom and the migration to the cities that occurred during post-Civil War years; suffering through the Great Depression and World War II.  I don’t believe this is a unique story. It seems that an incredible amount of bad luck has rained on this family across the generations, but many families suffered as  much and worse.  Yes, in the twentieth century my family finally was able to achieve a measure of middle class comfort, as did many families, and for that I am grateful.  But I don't want to forget, and I don't think that we as a people should forget, what we had to go through to get to here. Nor should we forget how tenuous that success can be, and how quickly a comfortable life can be destroyed by the loss of a job, a natural catastrophe, or a serious illness.  Maybe, by reflecting on our own history, we can have some compassion for those who are struggling today.  

I know this post has exceeded the limits of a blogpost, but so be it. I hope not to spend so much time on the next one.  

 

 

 

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