Thankful Thursday: Without their sacrifices, I wouldn't be here

 Today is Thankful Thursday and it also happens to be St. Valentine's Day.  So as Daisy-dog and I were returning from a McDonald's run with my dinner, thanks to a Valentine's gift of McDonald's gift cards from my mother (Thanks, Mom!), I began to think about my family, my ancestors, and how the brave things they did made it possible for me to be the person I am today.  It was their sacrifices and hard work that created a family and left a legacy that I am thrilled to track down today.  Here are a few things they did that I am thankful for:

- That several of my ancestors gave up the life they knew in their home countries and made the oftentimes treacherous and certainly terrifying voyage to the New World to make a life in America.  Among those:

   * George Hubbard (my 9th great-grandfather) left England and came to Hartford, Connecticut before 1639.

   *  Richard Watts (my 10th great-grandfather) brought his family, including his daughter, Elizabeth, who married George Hubbard, from England before 1640.

  * Thomas Rany (my 9th great-grandfather) left Scotland and settled in Middletown, Connecticut about 1657.

  * Hosea Tapley (my 6th great-grandfather) left England and came to North Carolina between 1691 - 1743.

  * Johann Conrad Hesser (my 6th great-grandfather) came from Germany sometime in the 1700's.

  * George Schwalls Sr. (my 2nd great-grandfather) left Germany and came to Georgia in the 1850's.

-  I am thankful that my 3rd great-grandmother, Sarah Tapley, was ahead of her time.  She bore and raised her children out of wedlock with her head held high, and she obviously raised them to be proud and productive members of society.

- I am thankful that so many of my ancestors and family members served in the military and fought for their country during the greatest conflicts in our history, including:

  * Nathaniel Ranney, my 6th great-grandfather, served in the American Revolutionary War.

  * Archibald Odom, my 4th great-grandfather, served as a horseman in the Georgia Militia during the War of 1812.

  * Francis M. Tapley, my great grand uncle, was killed at the Crater near Petersburg, Virginia, during the Civil War.

  * James Madison "Jim" Tapley, my great-grandfather and Francis's brother, fought during the Civil War and fortunately made it home.

  * George Schwalls, Sr. also fought in the Civil War after only having been in this country for a few years and suffered several health problems resulting from his service.

  * James William Drake, my 2nd great-grandfather, along with at least three of his brothers:  Francis Milton, John Saffold, and Richard Franklin, all fought during the Civil War.

  * Comfort Ranney, my 2nd great-grandfather, fought during the Civil War... on the Northern side.

  * Charles Morgan Tapley, my grandfather, served in the U.S. Navy twice, including in action during World War II.

  *  My uncle, John Russell "Russ" Tapley, who served in the U.S. Army during World War II.

  *  My cousin, James Cullen "J.C." Tapley, gave his life in Italy during World War II.

  *  My brother, Harry Earl Tapley, was a career Marine and served during the Vietnam War.

  *  And all the others who served.

- I am thankful that a childless couple named Charles K. and Sarah Melissa Schoonover Carter adopted an orphaned baby girl and doted on her their entire lives.  That little girl was my great-grandmother, Bessie Carter Ranney.

- I am thankful that my grandmother, Ethel Irene Ranney Tapley, persevered and retained her sweet soul despite being unable to walk and confined to a wheelchair for over half her life. 

- I am thankful that my grandmother, Nealie Drake Tapley, was such a strong, God-fearing woman.  She raised five sons and a daughter by herself, worked many jobs to feed  her family, and still found the energy to drive her horse and buggy over 10 miles each way on Sunday to play the piano at Powell's Chapel.

- I am especially thankful for my mother, Linda Irene Tapley, who is always there for me.

- I am thankful and proud that I have been able to devote a good part of my life to preserving my family's stories, histories, heirlooms, and facts.  I do not write this blog because I don't have a life; I write this blog because it enriches my life. 

Happy Valentine's Day to you and yours.

Day Two: Our final day at NARA

On this, the second day of our NARA adventure, we were old hands at getting around.  We breezed through the Metro and arrived at NARA about 10 AM.  Security was also a breeze, as well as signing in and getting our bright orange visitor/researcher badges.  We had done all of this before; we were now experts.  (We have also been very fortunate during this visit that the lines have been very short or nonexistent.)

We got another locker for our belongings and immediately hit the Finding Aids area; Ginger had more land records to fill out requests to have pulled, and I was still on the George Schwalls' short-lived Navy career hunt.  The same helpful archivist as yesterday helped me; he was relentless!  At one point, he had like six books open on the table, trying to find anything at all about George Schwalls even being in the CSA Navy.  Finally, he thought he had something and he called upstairs for help from another archivist.  She figured out what I needed to view (or at least she thought she did) and brought down the request form for me to complete.  The items would be pulled at 1:30 PM.

I helped Ginger look for some Confederate service records and then we headed to lunch.  We decided to get out of the NARA building today and walked a couple of blocks to the old Post Office.  It is now full of shops and a food court.  It is quite a contrast... the outside is absolutely beautiful and ornate while the inside is strip mall flashy and tacky.  There must be at least some federal offices still located in the building because at the main entrance where we went in, you still have to go through security.

The Old Post Office Pavilion, 1100 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C.

 After lunch, it was back up to the Central Research Room to view the War of 1812 Service and Pension Records we had requested the night before.  The service records were not robust at all.  Just a couple of "tickets" - one being information transferred from the regiments' muster roll and the other being payroll information.  I obviously need to do some research on the War of 1812 because it seems the men were enlisted for short terms, i.e., one of mine was six months and another was only 60 days.  Anyway, the information in those service records was sketchy at best.

Then I got to the the one pension file I had requested.  It was for my 4th great-grandfather, Jonathan Hesser.  Until the night before this trip, I was not even aware he had served during the War of  1812.  This pension file was no doubt the most exciting find of my trip.  I was not 100% certain that this was "my" Jonathan Hesser, but the pension file convinced me as it listed his wife and the fact that when he applied for the pension, he lived in Ohio.  The file is over 20 pages, and while I have not read every page line by line, I am still very excited to have it.  I look forward to transcribing and sharing it here on my blog.

You can only have one record out at a time, so it was after I finished looking at the military files before I could take a look at whatever the archivist had pulled for me regarding George Schwalls' Confederate Naval service.  It turned out to be two very old books of Naval Special Orders from 1863 and 1864.  It was with great hope that I opened the 1864 order book (George supposedly was transferred from the Confederate Army to the Navy in January of 1865, so the archivist and I were speculating that he received his orders in late 1864.)  I searched the Index of Names... no Schwalls.  OK, don't panic, Liz.  I turned to Special Order #88... which is the one the archivist thought would apply.  The order was several pages long, but there was no mention of George.  Hope is dimming, but there is one more thing I can double-check.  Paragraph 38 was also on George's naval service index card... so I checked that paragraph again for any mention of George... there was none.  As I dejectedly flipped back and forth in the book, looking for anything pertaining to my ancestor, I realized that this book only covered January - March 1864.  Wait a minute!  I need orders for later in the year.  Uh Oh.  It's almost the last pull time of the day:  3:30.  I have to hurry.  So I took the box back to the desk, explained my problem, and they sent me back down to my archivist friend in Finding Aides.  He had me fill out another request form with the other books I needed pulled and told me not to worry about the pull time.   He would get them to me in the Central Research Room.  He did deliver two boxes to me in about 30 minutes' time.  I eagerly began poring over them, and even enlisted Ginger's help.  No Schwalls anywhere.  The Special Order #88 in 1865 did not mention him.  The entire exercise was a bust.  Oh, well, that is the story of my research on George W. Schwalls.  My friend, Donna, swears he was a spy, and now I'm beginning to believe that, too.  It seems that every direction I turn in my research of him, I hit a brick wall.

Here I am, about to pitch a fit because I cannot find George Schwalls ANYWHERE!

 There were no more finds today. This concludes the story of my first ever trip to the National Archives in Washington, D.C.  It was exciting, frustrating, amazing, intimidating, exhausting, etc.  All those adjectives I used to describe the visit in the beginning still held at the end.

SIDE NOTE:  This is my 250th blog post!