Got A Shovel?

My last post I was excited because I thought that I had found my great, great, great grandfather was a prisoner in the Civil War. Well, that didn't pan out. It is absolutely amazing that you can have a name and date of birth and still not have the right person. How did I figure this out you might ask? Let me tell you.

See my great, great, great grandfather was Sol; maybe short for Solomon I'm still checking. I found the Civil War record for him but when I really sat down and looked at the dates that he would have been imprisoned it didn't add up with when my great, great grandfather Porter would have been born. He would have been somewhere far from home for at during the time that not just Porter was concieved and born but also at least one of not two of his sisters. Now don't get me wrong, I know that not everyone was faithful and I have a whole other blog coming about the skeletons you will find, but to believe that he might have been away and my great, great, great grandmother Caroline might have been stepping out would just open a whole different can of worms. Plus being that we are African-American then it stands to reason that he would not have been kept alive and so that would mean that he shouldn't have been there for the 1870 or 1880 census and I have him on both. When you add all that up is leads to the believe that whoever this Sol was he was not the one that I was looking for.

That is the fustration part of this research. You get all excited and ready to add a link to your family tree but when you stop and really, really look at dates and places and the sporatic information that you have then you find that what you thought you knew you didn't know at all.

Now I am searching for any relatives to him that might give me an insight into his parents names. The only problem there is that the last census I have him on is 1870 and I think I remember hearing that African-Americans where included on any census past that unless they were slaves and listed as such. This is where it will get muddy. If Sol was born a slave then I have to figure out where, to whom, and what their names were. I have found a few white people around him with the same last name but again there are no guarentees. You just have to keep digging.