Found a Confederate Ancestor...Using DNA.

Cdoug96

Corporal
Joined
Dec 22, 2016
Location
Michigan, United States
I found another Confederate ancestor, using DNA to confirm the relationship.

The following is what I posted on a genealogy site:

Henry was born in 1825. He is the son of Joseph Campbell and Rachel Washington\Martin. He was in the 1st Tennessee Regiment in the Mexican-American War, which earned him a pension and also earned his wife Angeline a widow's pension. In 1850 he is shown owning 2 female slaves. During the American Civil War he was a Confederate and enlisted in Company H, 24th Tennessee Infantry, enlisting Aug. 1861, as a 1st Sergeant and was later promoted to Captain. Company H was from Hickman County, Tennessee, and would later be consolidated with Company I on May 2, 1862, at which point Henry C. Campbell does not seem to appear in the records of the regiment anymore, suggesting he was mustered out.

Find a grave claims that he enlisted 24 Aug. 1861, as 1st Sergeant, and was promoted Captain 10 Dec. 1861, and wounded in leg at the Battle of Shiloh, before being sent to Corinth, Mississippi with the regiment. A article in Confederate Veteran magazine appears to confirm that he was 1st Sgt. at one point: " J.H. CLARK, of Lubbock, Tex., would like to hear from any of the old comrades of the 24th regiment, Tennessee Volunteers, Co H. The colonel of this regiment was R.D. ALLISON. The captain of Co. H was C.W. BEAL and his first sergeant was H.C. CAMPBELL. Company H was afterwards consolidated and became Co. I. The second first sergeant was JOE HOLMES and J.H. CLARK was the third first sergeant. He enlisted at Nashville on July 22, 1861."


Location of Hickman County:

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Thorough Shiloh and Corinth the 24th was brigaded with the 15th Arkansas, 2nd (Bate’s), 23rd, 24th and 35th Tennessee, and 6th Mississippi (later replaced with the 48th Tennessee), under General Patrick Cleburne, in General Hardee's Corps, and in June 1862 it was assigned to Major General Benjamin F. Cheatham’s Division, Brigadier General Alexander P. Stewart’s Brigade, composed of the 4th, 5th, 24th, 31st, 33rd Tennessee Infantry Regiments, and Stanford’s Mississippi Battery.

To help reconstruct his service record such as the United States Confederate Officers Card Index, 1861-1865, the United States Census, 1860 where he can be found living in Hickman County, Tennessee, the United States Civil War Soldiers Index, 1861-1865, and the Tennessee, Civil War Service Records of Confederate Soldiers, 1861-1865, index. The last one I listed does not list him in the regiment anymore after 1862, and none of the records list him in Company I, which is how I know he had to have been mustered out by 2 May 1862, and assuming the biography on Find-A-Grave is true, and he was wounded at Shiloh, it was probably that wound that knocked him out of the fight. I suspect that the book, Historical Sketch and Roster Of The Tennessee 24th Infantry Regiment (Tennessee Regimental History Series) (Volume 28), would give me more specifics, and the information on Find A Grave very well might have come from this book, but as of yet I don't know if this book is actually worth the money as I have a feeling that the book is only a general timeline with the regimental roster.

Henry Clayton Campbell (1825 - 1894)
Relationship: 1st Cousin of Capt. William Campbell (60th Illinois Infantry), my the great, great, great, great grandfather.

Regiments: 24th Tennessee Infantry (Company H)
Rank: 1st Sergeant and Captain
Enlisted: definitely in Aug. 1861, probably 24 Aug. 1861, as 1st Sergeant
Wounded: 6 April or 7 April, 1862, at the Battle of Shiloh
Mustered Out: unknown, but probably before May 2, 1862

All I had initially which tipped me off was a family tree on MyHeritage, and a DNA match with my grandfather. I did further digging which netted me an entry on FamilySearch which listed Henry as a son of Joseph Campbell and Rachel Washington\Martin. There were no sources which supported this relationship, and it looked like he had been added because he lived in the same county of that Campbell family and was the right age to be a son. This was not enough to convince me so I did more digging. I had already been working on confirming my relationship to this particular Campbell family using DNA, so I checked with that first to see if his descendant, Malcom Carter, matched with other Campbell relatives, and he did. These other Campbell relatives, which are my grandfather, Richard Douglas, and cousins Luena Sawyer and Ruby Bise, are all descendants of Henry's grandparents, John Campbell (abt. 1770 Ireland- bef. 1816 United States, a solider of the War of 1812, he may have been a causality of the war) and Eleanor (Denton) Campbell (1774 - 1835). Richard Douglas is a descendant of one son, John M. Campbell, Ruby Bise is a descendant of another son, William Campbell, and Luena Sawyer is a descendant of a third son, Joseph D. Campbell, through his daughter Virginia (Campbell) Underhill. Joseph Campbell is also the father of Henry Campbell, which makes Luena Sawyer and Malcom Carter descendants of siblings.

To ensure that all this information was correct, one has to match genetically in a very particular manner, and use a technique called triangulation to confirm it. Triangulation is used when a relationship is further than a 3rd cousin (if they are a 3rd cousin or closer a simple genetic match suffices), and requires that at least 3 people match on the same segment of DNA (overlap) to confirm a relationship with a common ancestor. With this in mind, I checked to see if all of 4 of them matched on the same segment of DNA, and if they did it would confirm the relationship as I laid out earlier. Sure enough, they did, all sharing a single segment of DNA on chromosome 2, a total of 8.8 cM long. There are also other relatives which match on that same segment, which marks them out as a descendant of Joseph and Eleanor Campbell, or one of their ancestors, including a few who live in the United Kingdom, and I suspect that an examination of those would supply information on the origins of the family in the United Kingdom, but that is a project of many weeks, perhaps months, and a project for another time.

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Some more information on the family of Capt. Henry C. Campbell:

The Campbell family of Henry C. Campbell is a example of the divisions that occurred in many families during the war. While Henry was a Confederate soldier and remained in Tennessee, he had many other siblings, 2 of them brothers, which all went south to Texas sometime between the years 1855 and 1860. Despite being in Texas, at least one of them, Joseph D. Campbell, Jr., was a Union sympathizer and joined a cavalry company under Martin D. Hart. The Texas Military Forces Museum gives the following information:

Hart's Cavalry Company, Martin D. Hart, Hunt County, raised this company in early part of the war and engaged in active partisan service as an independent company in Missouri and Arkansas, but Hart was captured by the Confederates, court-martialed and hung.

The Texas State Historical Society gives more details:

After Texas secession in February 1861, he (Martin D. Hart) resigned his Senate seat and returned to Hunt County. He resumed his law practice and, in July of 1861, organized and was elected captain of the Greenville Guards, a company of mounted volunteers. He wrote Governor Edward Clark, pledging the company's services "in defense of Texas whenever she is invaded or threatened with invasion." In the summer of 1862 he received a Confederate commission with permission to raise a company and operate in northwest Arkansas. Using his commission to travel through Confederate lines, he and his followers marched to southwest Missouri, where they apparently received Union army papers. Hart returned to Arkansas, led a series of rear-guard actions against Confederate forces, and is alleged to have murdered at least two prominent secessionists. He and some of his followers were captured by Confederate troops on January 18, 1863, and taken to Fort Smith, where he and his first lieutenant, J. W. Hays of Illinois, were court-martialed and hanged, on January 23, 1863. They were buried in unmarked graves under the tree where they were hanged. In 1864, when the federals took Fort Smith, Hart's body was exhumed and reinterred in the national cemetery there. Contributions from Unionists and federal soldiers purchased a headstone.

The book, Brush Men and Vigilantes: Civil War Dissent in Texas, by Pickering, David and Falls, ‎Judith M., gives information on Joseph's fate, and on other members of the family. To paraphrase, Joseph Campbell escaped capture and attempted to make his way back home with a few other men but they were forced into a thicket of trees, where they put up a short fight, before being captured and hung on 27 Mar 1863. Joseph was reported to have clasped hands with one of his comrades, Thomas Greenwood, while the noose tightened around their necks. His mother cut Joseph's body down and brought him home to be buried. Joseph had another brother, Armsted Campbell, who is also reported to have fought in the Civil War and was killed, but it is not known what side he was on. He also had two brothers-in-law who died in the war, Charles Smoot (the book says which side he was on is not clear, but I found a Charles Smoot in the 1st Texas Cavalry (Union)), and James Marrs, but I don't know which side James Marrs was on.

Capt. Henry Campbell had several other relatives in the war. My own ancestor, Capt. William Campbell, was his 1st cousin and was in the 60th Illinois Infantry, with 2 brothers, Sgt. Joseph Campbell and Pvt. James Campbell. Another group of 1st cousins, all brothers, were Pvt. John Campbell, Pvt. Alfred Campbell, Pvt. Joseph Campbell, and Pvt. William Campbell. The first 3 were all in the 6th Illinois Cavalry, and William was in the 18th Illinois Infantry, and the 58th Illinois Infantry. The last group of 1st cousins, again all brother, were Pvt. Joseph Basham and Sgt. Thomas Basham of the 23rd Kentucky Infantry (Union). Sgt. Thomas Basham was mortally wounded in skirmishing 25 June 1864, near Kennesaw Mountain, 2 days before the battle there, and died 2 months later in Nashville of that wound. His brother Joseph Basham was drafted into that same regiment and company 2 months later. As far as I know all the rest of them survived the war, but Sgt. Joseph Campbell lost an eye somehow. His post war picture is below:

Sgt Joseph Campbell.jpg


Most of Capt. Henry Campbell's immediate relatives were Union, probably because all but one of his father's siblings (most if not all born in Williamson County, Tennessee) moved north into Illinois (most to Hamilton County), with one sister marrying and going to Kentucky, but there were other relatives from his grandmother, descendants of Eleanor (Denton) Campbell's siblings, who were 2nd cousins, and some of them ended up in the Confederate forces, a few others in the Union army, and I think a few of them lived in Franklin, TN, but I will not name them here as this post is already long enough.

Williamson County, TN, and Hamilton County, IL, most of the Campbells settled in or near Mcleansboro, IL, it is about an 66 hr trip walking, which is close to the speed a horse can go walking (both average 3 to 4 mph), without stopping, so it would have been a trip of several days:

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Did Henry serve later in a cavalry regiment?
 
Well done! I have been able to fill some gaps with DNA - I find a "cousin" and go up from them until I meet my line. Hasn't worked for all of the kinfolks I've found, but I keep at it. Glad you had such a success!
 
Did Henry serve later in a cavalry regiment?

It's possible, but I have not seen anything suggesting that he did. I did find other H. Campbell's or Henry Campbell in Tennessee regiments but I far as I can tell none of them were from Hickman County, TN, and Henry Clayton Campbell is referred to as H. C. or Henry C. Campbell on all his records, never just Henry or H. Campbell.
 
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