Need some fold 3 help

Jamieva

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Been working on ancestry some more this week and can someone look up and see if a Dewitt Clinton Houston served in the Confederate forces? He was 19 years old at the time of the 1860 census living in Caroline County, VA. He died in 1930

Thanks
 
It looks like maybe he did. There's listing for Dewitt C Houston in Clark's Regiment, Infantry, H-R and Capt Baxter's Co, Light Artillery AND Capt Bibb's Cu, Artillery (Washington Artillery) in the Tennessee Artillery and a 9 page compiled service record. He was tall - 6'1. I'm not sure if this is your guy or not, since it looks like he died in 1924 and is buried in Arkansas.
 
Been working on ancestry some more this week and can someone look up and see if a Dewitt Clinton Houston served in the Confederate forces? He was 19 years old at the time of the 1860 census living in Caroline County, VA. He died in 1930

Thanks
Like @Gary Morgan I quickly found records for Dewitt C Houston, but not from Virginia. And Ancestry shows that your Dewitt remained in Virginia and is buried there. I checked every Houston in the Virginia records and could not find him. He's not in the 1890 Veterans Census either. But it seems odd for a 19-year-old not to serve. Do you know if other family members served?
 
Like @Gary Morgan I quickly found records for Dewitt C Houston, but not from Virginia. And Ancestry shows that your Dewitt remained in Virginia and is buried there. I checked every Houston in the Virginia records and could not find him. He's not in the 1890 Veterans Census either. But it seems odd for a 19-year-old not to serve. Do you know if other family members served?
I tried it under "Huston" too in case his name was misspelled in the records and drew a blank.
 
I also tried looking for Clinton Houston (there was one in Louisiana) and DC Houston (got a lot of maps on that one....). There was also a black Clinton Huston, but he fought for the North. I didn't find a D. Huston. There were two D. Houston's - one was an "Indian" and the other fought for the 39th Georgia Infantry.

Like the North, the South had loop holes to get out of serving in the military if you were wealthy. You could either hire a substitute to serve for you if you were drafted, or, in the war, you were exempt from serving if you owned 20 slaves or more.
 
Like @Gary Morgan I quickly found records for Dewitt C Houston, but not from Virginia. And Ancestry shows that your Dewitt remained in Virginia and is buried there. I checked every Houston in the Virginia records and could not find him. He's not in the 1890 Veterans Census either. But it seems odd for a 19-year-old not to serve. Do you know if other family members served?

His brother, my GG grandfather served. I thought it was odd at his age range that he did not serve. I just found my GGG grandfather on a POW roll from 1865 when he was nearly 60 years old!!!
 
Out of curiosity, where was your ggg grandfather a POW? (That's sort of my field of study, although I have to admit, I know more about Southern prison camps than Northern ones).

It's also not impossible that he could have enlisted under an alias. With no such thing as photo IDs, it was very easy to pass yourself off as someone else.
 
Out of curiosity, where was your ggg grandfather a POW? (That's sort of my field of study, although I have to admit, I know more about Southern prison camps than Northern ones).

It's also not impossible that he could have enlisted under an alias. With no such thing as photo IDs, it was very easy to pass yourself off as someone else.

Well the list I found this weekend is from the provost marshall office in Bowling Green, VA and the dates are from May 1865. Another person on ancestry had tagged it as a POW list, but it says at the top of the document "list of citi
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zens registered". I am thinking this may be the recording of people taking the oath of allegiance? There are men on the form all the way up to the age of 70 on it.
 
There WERE citizen prisoners during the War. Salisbury was originally a political prison rather than a military one, and you could be locked up for "disloyalty." As near as I can tell, there were about 300 non-military prisoners held at Andersonville; most of them were teamsters, but there were a few railroad employees and telegraph operators in the bunch. I'm inclined to agree with you, though, that this isn't a list of POWs - there are no regiments or place and date of capture, and I've never come across a POW registry that listed the prisoners' residences. Your theory about it being a list of men who'd taken the oath of allegiance sounds good to me, but hopefully someone will come along who knows more about provost marshals and their functions than I do.
 
Boy, is this poor fellow the victim of mistranscription. He is on the 1900 census as "David Houston" because his first name couldn't be read and on the 1910 census as "Dewitt Hariston" because his surname couldn't be read. In both years he was a farmer in Bowling Green, Caroline County, VA. On the 1910 census he is not listed as a veteran. I don't know about recruiting guidelines in Virginia; I thought that they were drafting just about everybody. @lupaglupa certainly may be right: there may have been some sort of physical issue.

https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/guides/opac/conpenabout.htm#Links says that it has a database of Virginia Civil War pensions but either I took a stupid pill this morning or it isn't accessible via Internet ☹️ Obviously, if he didn't serve there won't be a pension--but the Census isn't always accurate and I thought that I'd check this back up.
 
Boy, is this poor fellow the victim of mistranscription. He is on the 1900 census as "David Houston" because his first name couldn't be read and on the 1910 census as "Dewitt Hariston" because his surname couldn't be read. In both years he was a farmer in Bowling Green, Caroline County, VA. On the 1910 census he is not listed as a veteran. I don't know about recruiting guidelines in Virginia; I thought that they were drafting just about everybody. @lupaglupa certainly may be right: there may have been some sort of physical issue.

https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/guides/opac/conpenabout.htm#Links says that it has a database of Virginia Civil War pensions but either I took a stupid pill this morning or it isn't accessible via Internet ☹️ Obviously, if he didn't serve there won't be a pension--but the Census isn't always accurate and I thought that I'd check this back up.

This has been a common issue in documents with the census and the last name Houston. I have seen some many variants if the spelling.
 
This has been a common issue in documents with the census and the last name Houston. I have seen some many variants if the spelling.
Its not only the spelling. I once found that a local man (whose family had been in Maine since the Great Flood--give or take a century) being listed as having been born in Sweden. When I checked the original, it was his wife who was the Swede; someone had let his/her ruler go askew. I've learned to search by criteria and by family members.

"Huston" was a good guess. That seems to be the original spelling of the name. It is still spelled that way in Scotland (pronounced "who-ston".
 
... I once found that a local man (whose family had been in Maine since the Great Flood--give or take a century) being listed as having been born in Sweden. When I checked the original, it was his wife who was the Swede; someone had let his/her ruler go askew.

Umm ... Sweden is the name of a town in Maine.
 
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https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/guides/opac/conpenabout.htm#Links says that it has a database of Virginia Civil War pensions but either I took a stupid pill this morning or it isn't accessible via Internet ☹️ Obviously, if he didn't serve there won't be a pension--but the Census isn't always accurate and I thought that I'd check this back up.
I think this is the same listing that's at FamilySearch.

I think if he were a veteran we would have found something - a fellow might miss some of the different spots for being listed but to miss them ALL seems a pretty clear pointer that he didn't serve.
 
Umm ... Sweden is the name of a town in Maine.
Sweden, Maine is a small town in an exceptionally beautiful area of Oxford County; it has no connection to the European country but simply is one of the many towns named for foreign places (Denmark, Belgrade, Naples, Peru, China et al); there is also Norway, Maine but that is actually from an old native American word.
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Then there is New Sweden in Aroostook County which was really was settled by Swedes and made famous by a mass poisoning at a church supper.

The lady on the census was from the European country.
 
I think this is the same listing that's at FamilySearch.

I think if he were a veteran we would have found something - a fellow might miss some of the different spots for being listed but to miss them ALL seems a pretty clear pointer that he didn't serve.
I think you're right. The 1910 census says that he wasn't a veteran (not that census records are always accurate).
 
Sweden, Maine is a small town in an exceptionally beautiful area of Oxford County; it has no connection to the European country but simply is one of the many towns named for foreign places (Denmark, Belgrade, Naples, Peru, China et al); there is also Norway, Maine but that is actually from an old native American word.
Georgia's kind of like that, too. When I lived in Tallahassee, I always had to remind myself that when the locals mentioned Boston, they weren't necessarily talking about where I come from. And I'm not actually from Boston proper, it was just easier to say I was than to have to explain where Brockton was.

My daughter's DAR connections settled in Norway (Maine) after leaving Andover, Mass. It's not that far from Sweden, actually, although I hear that the spring in Poland dried up years ago, and only the name lives on, on plastic bottles.

And my parents had a camp in Aroostook County, which is farther up state than I like to drive.

And to get back to the original point, I think we all agree that the young man in question was not in the military.
 
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