Addendum – Admitting you are wrong when it comes to genealogy research is more than sometimes covering your ass. Whenever you unearth new pieces of information – the picture in your head changes. This happened recently.
My first essay for Maiden Name Unknown I chose to write about family propaganda – where I assumed that one of my great great aunts had published the story of my Great Great Grandparents anniversary – with an added line mentioning the patriotism of my family.
Now I find a secondary article where my great great grandparents both praise their parents for being Civil War veterans. My great great great grandfathers Palmer Lovejoy and Benjamin Preston both served in the Civil War. With mixed results – Palmer had a standard service. He later was one of the many Civil War soldiers who founded St. Cloud, Florida – one of the first communities of its kind for veterans.
Benjamin’s outcome was different. Benjamin enrolled in the military at Age 13. He was a volunteer. He was made a drum boy. And he deserted – a lot. Records I have found have him running away often, sometimes taking his stepbrother’s name as an alias. He was always caught and brought back and seemed to have a miserable time serving. He died in 1879/1880 – my guess from either suicide or an untreated illness he caught while serving. When died he was waiting for a pension and disability as veteran – by the time the government denied him, claiming they had no records of him seeing doctors or being sick while serving, Benjamin had died. My family doesn’t mention this in the article, instead they talk about his bravery at volunteering when other’s were refusing the draft going to hide in the woods.
For me the second article made me realize I’m seeing the beginning of the change in my family and their relationship with religion. My great great grandparents were both Jehovah’s Witnesses, a religion that focuses on being anti-war, anti-military and anti-patriotic. When I was growing up I remember the elders lecturing my little cousin for choosing to wear his hair short, because it looked too militaristic. But here my ancestors joined an organization for children of Civil War Veterans – if they had tried this today, they would have been reprimanded.
Elbridge Lovejoy served as a judge and a selectman and was very civilly minded. Him and his wife were engaged in the community, and lived a fairly standard life, and I wonder if they could have lived with the restrictiveness of the religion today – they were held in reverence in my family for being godly people – but would their godliness hold now?
Maiden Name Unknown 