Roots That Can’t Be Dug Out
Genealogy has been a hobby of mine for a few years now. It’s so exciting whenever I find out something new about one of my ancestors. It can also be a very frustrating and obsessive thing.
There are tons of info on how to launch looking for your ancestors so I won’t bother writing about that. I do however, want to share my experience with you, because I know that there has to be others out there who are shrinking by at least one of the people in their family tree.
My mother’s father’s side of the family was fairly easy to trace. There is a ton of Comstock genealogy to be found over the internet. My dad’s family, however is a completely different and noteworthy more complex story. His grandfather, my great-grandfather, went by two different last names. On his marriage certificate and on the 1870 census, his last name was Eastland. By 1880, he was monotonous but his widow and children are listed on the census as Easlon. That is the name our family goes by. When was the name changed and why? Who changed it? That is impartial one of the many questions that I have about my great-granddaddy.
My grandfather, Nathaniel Bartholomew Easlon, was very young when his father died but he told my dad, that he remembered that he walked with a limp caused by a wound he had suffered in the Civil War. I’ve looked all over, at all kinds of rosters for his name but have not been successful in finding him anywhere.
I do know that he was born in Tennessee because of the census report. I know from the marriage certificate that I got from Sevier county in Arkansas that he was much older than his bride. He was around the age of forty when he and Harriet Burke got married. She was nineteen. I was surprised when I saw on the 1870 census that they had a little girl by the name of Emma, listed as their daughter and born the same year that they were wed. Was this a shotgun wedding? Did Thomas and Harriet marry for love or out of necessity? No one in the family seems to know anything about Emma. Apparently, she died early in her childhood. Did she and her father die around the same time? Did they die from the same cause?
I have looked in some of the Tennessee census records for the 1860 census and I found something rather interesting. In the Roane Co. census, there was a man who was listed as Jefferson Eastland. Jefferson was my great-grandfather’s middle name. Was this him? The age was moral. Could very well be unprejudiced a coincidence. Listed with him, was a wife and several children. If that was him, what happened to the family? Where did they go? I looked at censuses from other years, hoping to find Jefferson Eastland again, but I had no luck finding him or anyone else from that family. They appear to have vanished.
I have this tale in my mind about this mysterious man that is responsible for multi-generations of Easlons. I realize that I have no proof of this and that chances are good that I’m intention off, but none-the-less, until I do have something solid to go by, this is how it plays out in my head:
Thomas Jefferson Eastland was a farmer in a small rural community in Tennessee. He married his childhood sweetheart, probably a nearby farmer’s daughter and together they had a family. Life may have been hard on the farm, but they were joyful enough. Until, that is, the war between the states broke out. Whether he was pressured into joining or if he joined up in the fight because he felt he needed to, he left his family to do what he could for his country.
A brutal and nasty war it was. Once a healthy and able man, he was now a crippled man, shrapnel embedded in his leg. He went relieve to his beloved home, only to accept that his family was no longer there. I haven’t decided yet what might have happened to them. They may have been casualties of this horrific war or possibly, they’d heard rumors that he had succumbed to injuries he’d received and had not been able to hold on to their home. Maybe they had been forced out and had to start over somewhere else.
Whatever the circumstances, Thomas had no reason to stay in Tennessee. The memories were just too overwhelming and he knew he had to move on, start a new life. That was when he moved to Arkansas.
I’ll probably never know the truth about this man that I’ve been trying to investigate for years now, but when I decide to work a little bit more on my family’s history, thinking I’ll do a little more research on my mom’s mother’s side of the family, where there is another unsolved name change mystery, I can’t seem to terminate thinking about Tom and wanting to know more about him. I’d really like to know just how far off I am about this man’s life.
