Post # 2 ~ Who Were These People?

Suddenly Want to Know

The Jeffers letters, like most original Civil War documents, shed light on a fascinating time in our national history. The intense patriotism, violence, misery, and hard-won victory by the Union - all these and many more reasons compel people to study the Civil War exhaustively. There are still so many things to understand.

Integral to my project is an understanding of the family life of the three letter-writing brothers. When it comes to the Jeffers family, that is harder to research than I expected. Most southern families kept genealogical records, and were proud of their "blood." Detailed records were kept and passed on, even after Sherman's court-house rampages. In 1861, the families of my all my great-great grandparents lived in South Carolina, owned slaves, attended church, and were loyal to the Confederacy. Almost all of my great-great-grandparents can be researched in old records. That one great-great that left no genealogical trail? Mr. Henry Langford Jeffers, 1809-1890, father of the family of letter-writers.

I understand that often, especially when you have their own hand-written papers, the act of writing about long-ago people makes you feel as if you know them personally. You become invested emotionally; you care about what happened to them. 

Spann's letter from Deep Bottom, VA, September 22, 1864.

Of course, that happened to me!

I can't see the 260+ Jeffers brothers' letters as just standing there alone, worthy only of study as yet another set of data points about who fought where, when, under which general. I want to know about their forebears, their parents, their sisters, their childhood, their hometown - anything that influenced them.

As for researching Jeffers forebears, I didn't get anywhere. I joined all these genealogy websites and sent in my DNA samples, thinking it would be a piece of cake. For the aforesaid fifteen other family lines from 1861, the digital family trees match perfectly with all the old paper charts we already had. But the Jeffers family? Nothing. Henry L. Jeffers' father Nathaniel is a total mystery - no parents or siblings or cousins to be found on the thousands and thousands of records in Ancestry-dot-com, etc. [Update: years after writing that last sentence, I did find the group who were almost certainly Nathaniel's brothers, nieces and nephews - all living in northern Tennessee and fighting for the Union.]

So I turned to researching the man himself - the life and times of father-of-the-family, merchant Henry Langford Jeffers, and the small town where the three brothers and two sisters grew up: Hamburg, SC. There was much to be found! Now this became really interesting to me. 

Relic of a ghost town. Photo by Larry Gleason.

The posts in this "side-show to the main-show" will give a glimpse of the Jeffers brothers' and sisters' formative years by means of exploring a person and a place that touched them directly - their Pa, Henry L. Jeffers, and the town where they grew up, Hamburg, SC.

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