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july 8, 2008
the blue block
Oooh, I love this one! This, the latest block for my civil war sampler, is also from Barbara Brackman's Facts and Fabrications: Unraveling the History of Quilts and Slavery Reading this history got me thinking about my relatives during the Civil War. I knew there were some who fought in the war, but I didn't know much about them. I spent an evening looking through some ancestry stuff and found that practically every male ancestor alive at the time had a military record. All on the Confederate side, of course, as my family is deeply rooted in the South. In fact, I remember once trying to ask my relatives in Texas where the family originally came from and they would say, weeeellll, waaaaay back, I think the family came over from.... Georgia. Yes, Georgia, the state four states over from Texas. Way back. Turns out, "way back" was around the time of the Civil War. I found records that show that my great great grandfather joined the infantry in Georgia in 1862. He signed up at the age of 16 along with his father, my great great great grandfather, who was about 45.
Their regiment was among the many who surrendered to Grant's forces in 1863 in the Siege of Vicksburg, a great victory for the North (coincidentally, the move towards Vicksburg, Mississippi was aided by the Union's success in overtaking Corinth where Beauregard found himself surrounded). Both my great great grandfather and his father returned to their regiment after their release and were captured again, probably in 1864 in Kentucky, but survived the war without serious injury. My great great grandfather is the closest direct relative to me that I could find who fought in the war, but there were dozens of his cousins and uncles in the war as well. As I work on other blocks from the Civil War books, I hope to look more into their histories and some of the battles they were a part of. My block may be blue, but my history is gray. posted by alison at 9:30 am | in
civil war sampler
Comments
Isn't family history fascinating? My mom has a copy of a letter that my maternal great-great-grandfather, who lived on a farm near Gettysburg, wrote to a family member telling them he could hear the sounds of the great battle as it was going on. He also described the scene of the battlefield after it was over with and the numerous bodies of the dead. He also mentions how the smell of gunpowder and decomposition hung heavily in the air and that he would never forget what he saw that day. Posted by: Mel at July 8, 2008 10:27 AMI applaud your efforts to discover your family history. It sounds very interesting. It seems like they were very much products of their environment and their times. Posted by: Kelli at July 8, 2008 11:31 AMI love hearing about personal history like that. You are so fortunate to have that background info - my grandparents were Irish immigrants, from very poor families, with really no records still available to peruse. Wow! Posted by: Mandy at July 8, 2008 12:51 PMAmazing, Mel. I can't imagine how people carried on with their lives with the war going on around them. I'm reading some similar stories in the book, The Civil War Diary Quilt: 121 Stories and The Quilt Blocks They Inspired. Wow, Patrice, I didn't know that! It's so hard to think of American's not celebrating the 4th. Or, as I read in some the Confederate diaries, someone who doesn't think of Lincoln as "their" president or who refers to the Union as the enemy. A civil war is a crazy thing. Posted by: ALISON at July 8, 2008 12:59 PMLove that block - the design is pleasing & the colors are lovely. All this history is so interesting. Like Patrice, most of my ancestors are relatively recent immigrants - mostly from Ireland also. One grandfather came from the Philly area & supposedly his family had been here for a really long time (my grandma said he was from a Philly 400 family & was disowned when he married a Canuck -her term- but she did like to make her stories more interesting & he died several years before I was born. My father didn't have much info about him & with the last name of Smith, searching for genealogical info is a daunting task. I didn't know that about Vicksburg. We visited there after my daughter's wedding. She was married in her husband's church in Bogue Chitto Ms. which is about 65 miles south of Jackson. His family has lived there for generations & he probably had ancestors who fought in the Civil War. Posted by: Donna at July 8, 2008 1:28 PMHmmm...as a dyed-in-the-wool Southerner, aren't you required to call it a "War of Northern Aggression Sampler"? ;) Posted by: Suzanne V. (Yarnhog) at July 8, 2008 4:47 PMLove Suzanne's comment! I guess we'll have opposing sides' samplers! Posted by: Carol at July 8, 2008 5:11 PMI love family history. I'm French-Canadian and some of my family has been here since the first settlers arrived (Coureurs des Bois - Runners of the Woods/fur traders - 1600s). There is history all the way back to when they first arrived, names, ages and even which town in France they came from (typically coming from Church records). The other side of my family settled later in Canada, in the late 1700s. Posted by: Chantale at July 8, 2008 8:29 PMCool, Chantale. How great that you have records of the first settlers from your family in the New World. I don't know exactly where my ancestors came from originally - they've been here in America so long - but the family history has been traced back to one Revolutionary soldier. Posted by: ALISON at July 8, 2008 10:40 PMWOW Posted by: Orli at July 13, 2008 10:35 AM |
and is called Beauregard Surrounded. The block is traditionally called Burgoyne Surrounded after the defeat of a British general during the Revolutionary War. Brackman has renamed it to recall the Civil War, more specifically the defeat of Confederate general Beauregard at 
