William David Stewart was my great-grandfather, the father of my paternal grandmother, Mabel Claire Stewart. The very little information I have about him, that my grandmother was able to discover, comes from just five and one-half years of his life, from April 1898, when he joined the First Texas Cavalry to fight in the Spanish-American War, to the first week of November 1903, when he abandoned my great-grandmother three weeks before my grandmother was born in Roswell, New Mexico Territory. My grandmother spent a good many years trying to gather more information about her father, but every trail went nowhere.
I have re-plowed much of the same ground as my grandmother. I think I have chased many more fruitless leads than she. I have thought of more ideas, and I thought it might be good to keep a journal of my efforts. I am not good at keeping journals. But since I have never blogged before, I decided this might be a way to keep myself interested in recording what I have done and what I plan to do to try to find out who this great-grandfather was.
What is it about those Stewarts?
ReplyDeleteI spent a few hours the other evening combing through military and census records, looking for the family of my own great-great grandfather, Benjamin Stewart. One wrong turn took me back to King James IV of Scotland, father of Mary Queen of Scots.
I am always on the lookout for Will as well!
So, if I get more "followers" (that even sounds creepy, like I am some sort of cult leader), will any of them think that I married my cousin?
ReplyDeleteThe more searching I do, the more I think that at some very long ago, far away place, there might be a common ancestor..
ReplyDeleteMy Stewart mission is to find Benjamin Stewart, born in 1835 in Virginia, died in Ohio. Will Stewart is the generation of his children -- not that I think he is Benjamin's son, but there seem to be a lot of Stewarts who migrated from Virginia into Tennessee and then on to Louisiana. Others went northwest into Ohio.
I've been trying to focus on the families in certain regions instead of the individual, and hope that in doing so, I might locate the right family -- two brothers, Benjamin and Richard, with a mother named Jane.
The mystery is how some people managed to be completely off the radar screen. The Civil War, which had to have completely disrupted families in every way possible, as well as the next census taking in 1870..
And you make an excellent cult leader. :)
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