Back in Time

To be or not to be?

I considered just beginning a new blog for all the other assorted branches of my mother's side of my family tree--one for the Alawines, one for the Tolberts, you know. But you see that, instead, I just changed the blog description a little, because if you go back far enough with ancestors who stayed in the same area for two or three generations, everybody's related, anyway. Why go to another page for a different tree?

So, although the blog STARTED with Alawines, we're going to be inclusive now.

The last post I wrote was about my grandmother, Lillian Luke, and my grandfather, Henry Tolbert. Refresh your memory with another glance at the family chart:

Tolberts, Culbertsons, Lukes, Claughtons and others

These people tended to move around a little less than my Alawine ancestors. Over half of them were born in Mississippi beginning around 1844. Once they were in Kemper, Lauderdale, Neshoba Counties, they more or less stayed there, until we descendants got our own case of itchy feet and started rambling ourselves.

So, in a way, they were easier to trace back than Daddy's family.

 Let's start with a photo of the Tolberts taken in 1917:

Tolberts 1917

Here's a "key" to who's who.

A couple of things: Lucilla Tolbert Powell was Charles Wesley's sister. She's sitting at Eliza's left, and her children (except Hettie, at the far left side of the photo) are near her.

I've always felt kind of sorry for my great-grandmother Elizabeth "Eliza" Culbertson Tolbert. She's holding Nellie Grace (my great-aunt "Jim") on her lap; beside her is Ellie Mae ("Peg"); and right behind her is Mary, her oldest child, who was 28. In other words, she was having babies for about 24 years or so.

(My grandmother Alawine beat that, though. She had babies for 27 years.)

I've often wondered about that name--Charles Wesley. In 1880 he's listed on the census as "Charly Wesley" (the "Charly" of which could have been--as usual--just a mistake). But his father was Henry R. Tolbert, a Baptist minister. You just gotta have some questions about why that famous Methodist name was given to the son!
  
Here are a couple of other photos I have--one of Charles W. and Eliza, the other just of her; it looks as if she's feeding the chickens. Or maybe they think she's going to. I believe that's Lou Tolbert in the background, grinning.

Charles Wesley Tolbert, Eliza Culbertson Tolbert

Eliza Culbertson Tolbert and (probably) Lou in back

Neither of the photos had dates on them. Given that Eliza died in 1934 and Lou appears to have been at least 16 or 17, the pictures could have been taken about 1921.

Charles has shaved off his beard since the big group photo. Wonder why?
  
In the years before my daughters were born, and in the summers when I wasn't teaching, Mother and Daddy and I would sometimes roam around East Mississippi, going back to the old places, long unvisited, where they had grown up. On one of those rambles, we went to Edinburg, where I was able to get some snapshots OF large portraits of my Tolbert ancestors back beyond Charles Wesley. That day--due to circumstances I won't go into on this blog--I had to climb up on a chair and focus on portraits framed under heavy glass and hanging a good foot or more over my head. Oh, well--what you do for history!

Henry R. Tolbert (date? 1880?)

Mary Amanda A. Mott (date?)

Here are Henry R. and Mary Ann Amanda Mott. Her portrait had been damaged--it seems maybe with water--but you can get a fair idea of what she looked like.

Now, as I said, Henry R. was a Baptist preacher. He apparently had strong ideas about his ministry, if you go by the poem below, which, when she gave me this copy, Lou Tolbert Munn said he wrote.

Henry R. was also in the Civil War.

One of the most poignant things I've found in the archive papers is the requisition below in which Henry asked for "1 pr shoes" and "1 pr drawers." The quartermaster evidently denied (and crossed out) a petition for a pair of pants (I think it's that) and a shirt. Under the listed items, someone wrote, "For the use of them/ Sick and being in need of Same." They were eventually distributed to him, it seems, on or after April 3rd, 1863--probably after, since this is just the paperwork. Or maybe he never got them at all: supplies were always low.

Again, another wonderful thing (for me) is seeing his signature at the bottom.

When they're not messed up with errors, censuses can be revealing things. The 1880 census for Neshoba County shows J. H. Tolbert (this would be John "Jack" Holliday Tolbert, or Talbert), Henry's father, and Hester ("Molly"), his wife, with several grown children under their roof, including Mary Wilson and two grandchildren. Why were the Wilsons there with Jack and Molly?

Well, it turns out that Mary's husband Tom had been killed at the battle of Perryville, KY, on October 8, 1862.

She hadn't married since he died, and she was living with her father and mother again, raising her two children. Tom had served in the same regiment as Henry R., his brother-in-law, as records show. (Compare to Henry's,
above.)

Either Lou Munn or my mother told me that he was very near Henry when he was killed; I don't know about that part.
  
But in March of 1863 Mary presented herself before a justice of the peace in Lauderdale County, MS, to petition for his back pay. With her were Henry Alexander and Sherwood Wilson, Tom's father.

Papers filed in Lauderdale County, MS, 1863, by Mary Tolbert Wilson

Since Tom had died in October, and it was March, Mary may have been pregnant: her daughter Margaret was born that same year. (Or maybe the daughter had already been born by the time Mary saw the judge.) Mary was successful in her petition. She may have already been living with Jack and Molly by then, but if she wasn't, at some point she moved there with her two children, as the 1880 census above shows.
  
There's another story behind all this. Sometimes, when a soldier died, a commanding officer wrote a few lines about him--what he looked like, where he was from, and so on. Captain James Hicks penned this note about Private Wilson. So now, today, though there's no photo of him I've ever seen, we can envision him a little.

"Descriptive Soft" of Thonas Wilson

Transcription

Life was hard in Mississippi in the 1800's. Tom Wilson and Mary Tolbert married at as young an age as her great-nephew William Henry Tolbert and Lillian Luke. In Mary's case, she was the one left with two babies to raise. As a young woman in the 1860's, she probably had only two choices: get married again, or live with relatives. She chose the latter. It's an interesting comment on the times that she had to have two male witnesses to accompany her and vouch for her honesty in requesting Tom's back pay.

Next time: Jack Holliday Tolbert and Hester "Molly" Davidson...the woman with the thick accent!

Ælfwine