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Unlike Veterans Day, which celebrates the service of all U.S. veterans, Memorial Day was\u00a0specifically set aside for\u00a0remembering and honoring those Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice and died while in military service.\u00a0For this Memorial Day, I want to honor the memory of one of my direct ancestors who died while serving his country in the U.S. Civil War: Private Hiram Scott of Company C of the Illinois Infantry Volunteers.<\/p>\n
Hiram Scott is my fourth-great-grandfather. He was the great-grandfather of the the great-grandmother I was lucky enough to know for the first fourteen years of my life\u2014Gertrude Scott Askew.<\/p>\n
Hiram Scott fought for the Union Army along with the\u00a0three\u00a0of his sons who were old enough to serve: Horace, Willard, and James. Willard and James survived the war, while\u00a0Horace “contracted disability which resulted in his death” five years later. Their father, Hiram, however, never returned home from the war. To this day he remains\u00a0buried where he died\u2014in New Orleans, a long way from his home and family in northern Illinois.<\/p>\n
Horace’s birthplace, parents, siblings, and pretty much the entire first half of his life have been an enduring\u00a0mystery for me. Over the past three decades I have\u00a0repeatedly hit brick walls while\u00a0trying to uncover\u00a0the details of his birth and the first half of his\u00a0life, including the\u00a0identities of his parents and siblings. What little I information I have found\u00a0about his early years has been\u00a0sparse, often speculative, and frequently\u00a0contradictory. In this post, I want to do my best to break though this brick wall to learn about Hiram Scott, an ancestor I want\u00a0to remember and honor on this\u00a0Memorial Day.<\/p>\n
My research notes tell me\u00a0that Hiram lived for some time in or near Bolivar, Allegany county, New York, where his three eldest sons were born between 1842 and 1847. Before 1842, I have nothing reliable. This is where I want to pick up the trail. In the following series of posts, I’ll detail my search for his parents as well as documenting serendipitous finds I made along the way that reveal bits and pieces of the life of Hiram Scott.<\/p>\n
The approach that I’ll be using this time around is\u00a0potentially labor-intensive and gives\u00a0no guarantees of helping me make\u00a0a breakthough. Rather than starting with a known person and working backwards, this time\u00a0I’ll by\u00a0looking for people who might<\/em> be relatives.\u00a0I’ll look for people who share\u00a0the same last name (Scott), who lived\u00a0in locations that Hiram frequented, and who had family members with given names that were similar to those in Hiram’s known family.<\/p>\n Once I assemble a pool of\u00a0such potential relatives, I’ll trace the families of each to see if I can\u00a0find any connections between them and\u00a0my ancestor Hiram Scott.<\/p>\n A reasonable person might rightly conclude that this is a desperate\u00a0way to go about\u00a0family history research, given the long odds and the potential amount of work involved. Yep.<\/p>\n I started with the earliest place I knew Hiram to be associated with\u2014New York state (possibly Bolivar, Allegany county, New York). I looked for all Scotts in Allegany County and to my surprise I found a promising candidate relative right away\u2014Hiram Jackson Scott (born August 22, 1833, in Bolivar, New York).<\/p>\n My ancestor Hiram Scott was born around 1815 according to his military records, so this new Hiram Jackson Scott definitely wasn’t in my ancestor’s immediate\u00a0family, but perhaps he was a first or second cousin? As this lead seemed so promising, I temporarily set aside my plan to assemble a pool of potential relatives and decided to focus on this one lead first.<\/p>\n I traced Hiram Jackson Scott’s family back two generations at first. His parents, John Scott Jr. (1804\u20131847) and Artmissa Frost Scott (1810-1883), would have been far too young to be my ancestor Hiram’s parents, so I went back another generation in\u00a0Hiram Jackson Scott’s line to his paternal grandparents John Scott Sr. (1777\u20131850) and Polly Rogers Scott (1778\u20131847). Now we’re in the ballpark\u2014if these Scotts were the parents of my\u00a0ancestor Hiram Scott, they would have had him when they were about 38 and 37 years old (assuming a birth date of ca. 1815).<\/p>\n From the as-yet-unverified research done by other genealogists on the family of John Scott Sr and Polly Rogers Scott, it appears that they had nine children:<\/p>\n Fantastic! This Scott family did indeed have a son named Hiram who was born around the same time as my ancestor Hiram (January 7, 1812 vs. circa 1815), and this Scott family\u00a0also had a younger son named Horace (the name that my ancestor Hiram gave his first-born son, my third-great-grandfather). As coincidences go, this is pretty good stuff.<\/p>\n But how should\u00a0I test the hypothesis that this newly found Hiram Scott is the same person as my ancestor Hiram Scott? First, I’ll need to research and critically examine everything I think I know about my ancestor Hiram Scott\u2014if I’m going to be comparing what I know about the new Hiram Scott to my ancestor Hiram Scott, I need to have my facts established and in order.<\/p>\n Second, I’ll need to\u00a0line up the facts I can find for the newly found Hiram Scott and look for ways to demonstrate that these are two different people. Were they living in different places at the same time? Did they marry different people? Is there a record of two Hiram Scotts about the same age who were living in the same area at the same time (it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve gotten fooled by such a coincidence<\/a>)?<\/p>\n If at the end of this exercise I don’t find any way to exclude the newly found Hiram Scott as being the same person as my ancestor Hiram Scott, I’ll accept this as initial support for the hypothesis that these two people are indeed the same person. In that case, a possible next step would be to look for a solidly documented living descendant of the newly found Hiram Scott’s father John Scott, and see if I could talk them into taking a genetic ancestry test to see if our genetic relatedness matches what I’d expect (5th to 6th cousin) as a result of both being descendants of John Scott Sr (1777\u20131850).<\/p>\n In part 2\u00a0of this series<\/a>, I’ll begin by setting out and examining what I know about\u00a0my ancestor Hiram Scott.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Unlike Veterans Day, which celebrates the service of all U.S. veterans, Memorial Day was\u00a0specifically set aside for\u00a0remembering and honoring those Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice and died while in military service.\u00a0For this Memorial Day, I want to honor the … Continue reading \n