Reconstructed Rebel
1st Lieutenant
- Joined
- Jun 7, 2021
Discovering just how many of my CW relatives were marked as deserters at one time or another has been educational for lots of different reasons, but I'm proposing a thread here where we acknowledge the black sheep in our families. Most of us, I think, like to comb through the family tree and pick out people we can brag about, at least to our children. But we know they weren't all saints. Here's some of my sinners....
My great-grandmother as a child carried breakfast and supper each day for a week to her uncle who was hiding out at the back of the farm because he was wanted for stealing horses. He managed to get away from the sheriff in Kentucky and safely made his way to Kansas, but he kept stealing horses. He was finally caught red handed. He was tried, convicted, his appeal rejected, and the sentence of hanging from the neck until dead carried out. These last four events all together were said to have taken not more than 15 minutes. They say you shouldn't mess with Texas, but I don't think you should fool around with Kansas either.
Our grandson was given an assignment this spring to write about a direct ancestor associated with an event in history and I gleefully collected all the stories he could be proud of. His choice, however, was the unfortunate 13 times great grandfather who was one of the few survivors of an situation where recent archeological excavations have pointed to wide spread cannibalism among the survivors. The title of his class presentation was "I May or May Not Be the Descendant of a Cannibal." But he got an "A" so that's something I can brag about!
My great-grandmother as a child carried breakfast and supper each day for a week to her uncle who was hiding out at the back of the farm because he was wanted for stealing horses. He managed to get away from the sheriff in Kentucky and safely made his way to Kansas, but he kept stealing horses. He was finally caught red handed. He was tried, convicted, his appeal rejected, and the sentence of hanging from the neck until dead carried out. These last four events all together were said to have taken not more than 15 minutes. They say you shouldn't mess with Texas, but I don't think you should fool around with Kansas either.
Our grandson was given an assignment this spring to write about a direct ancestor associated with an event in history and I gleefully collected all the stories he could be proud of. His choice, however, was the unfortunate 13 times great grandfather who was one of the few survivors of an situation where recent archeological excavations have pointed to wide spread cannibalism among the survivors. The title of his class presentation was "I May or May Not Be the Descendant of a Cannibal." But he got an "A" so that's something I can brag about!