There Will Be Blood – and Flowers

Facebook friends who click on this post: I haven’t been on Facebook in about a month. I don’t particularly miss it. I am still on Instagram & Twitter, though 🙂

Some of you may know that I have been rather immersed in genealogical research for the past little while. I have always been interested in the topic, but finding the free website familysearch.org gave me the ability to learn more without paying for it. (Thanks to Mom for the gift of 6 months on Ancestry & their DNA test, and to Aunt Donna for that first month on Ancestry that showed me how much they have to offer!)

Tomorrow is an exciting, yet intimidating, day for me. We’ve all been to cemeteries. As a teenager, I greatly disliked them, thinking them to be a way of making amends for our failings to the dead. I even disliked the visits for genealogical research, being dragged along by Mommy to scour the headstones in Jefferson County, Ohio. (Sorry for that. Wish we had pictures.)

I think Papa being cremated was the start of a change in that attitude. In that mythical someday when I am independently wealthy, he will have a headstone. Everyone deserves their name being carved into a rock.

Following in the family tradition, I drug my own progeny about the cemeteries of East Tennessee last month. It was a moving experience for me to see the resting place of my dad’s ancestors. Thomas Laymon & Amelia Sparks, with their joint headstone, knowing that his death certificate included the loss of is wife as a cause of death. Richard Daughtrey, with a beautiful poem inscribed, but eroding away, and his wife next to him. (She lived another 50ish years and never remarried, which is a puzzle I’ll never solve.)
But those headstones, for the most part, have been catalogued, photographed, and placed in numerous trees. Some of the newer ones still have people tending them.

Tomorrow is different. I go to visit the grave of Joseph Nelson Bailey, my 4th great grandfather. Here’s a bit of his story.

Joseph Nelson Bailey, who went by Nelson, was born about 1838 in (probably Long Bottom,) Meigs County, Ohio. His father, Joseph, was a blacksmith. His mother, Elizabeth Rardon, was descended from the family for whom Rardon, Ohio is named. Nelson was the youngest of three siblings. His mother is dead by the time of the 1850 census, but no death record has been found.
In 1850, Nelson lived with his sister, his cousin, & her family. He was next door to his father, maternal aunt Hannah, & his oldest sister, Mary
In 1858, Nelson married Eliza Smith. She was a young lady from across the Ohio River, and she already had a one year old.
By 1860, they are living next door to his father with Eliza’s son (who he passes of as his own) and their daughter, Jennete (my 3rd great grandmother.
Late in 1860, the nation moved to war, and Nelson heeded its call. He enlisted in the 63d Ohio Volunteer Infantry. I have pondered his reasons, and I can never be certain, but his place on what would now be the border of the Confederacy is a likely factor. (Did you know that there was a Civil War battle in Ohio? I didn’t. It was in Meigs County, not far from where Nelson lived.)
Unlike many people during that time who never strayed far from home, Nelson left Ohio and saw Kentucky, Missouri, and Mississippi. His unit was significant in the battle of Corinth.
In late 1863, despite the Union army’s poor state, Nelson reinlisted. His unit was granted a veteran furlough, and he returned home in January of 1864. He got to meet his second daughter, Margaret, who would have been a toddler of less than 2 years of age.
The 63d Ohio Veteran Infantry returned to the war shortly thereafter. They missed the horrors of the battles around Chattanooga. They marched south through the slaughter at Chickamauga. It was a hard march to Resaca, Georgia. The Union saw a bittersweet victory there after days of fighting.
Nelson marched south with the 63d. Rations and water became scarce, and most of the travel was at night. He guarded the railroads of Kingston, then received the orders to continue to Dallas. Sherman wanted to flank the Rebels around Dallas, so Nelson and his comrades went the roundabout way to reach the area.
They arrived in Dallas, GA, on 26 May 1864. A regiment disturbed an apiary, and the bees ran them off; the ensuing chaos gave the regiment some fine food for the evening in place of the 29 days of salt beef and hardtack they’d recently received.
On 27 May, Colonel Jackson of the 63d writes, “Whilst eating breakfast at 5:30 this morning the enemy attacked our pickets and Grand Guard line and in a few minutes the wounded were being brought in. 6:00 A.M. Our brigade moves into position to support the skirmishers who are having a sharp fight. 8:00 A.M. Heavy skirmishing. The rebels are said to have been dressed in our uniform and surprised our Grand Guard this morning who mistook them for friends. Dark. Our regiment has been in line all day. There has been heavy skirmishing and an occasional artillery duel during the day and our division has lost a good many men. Our regiment had four killed and six or eight wounded while in the line of battle.” ( from The Colonel’s Diary, p. 123-124, Col. Oscar Jackson of the 63d OVI, at WWW.archive.org/stream/colonelsdiaryjou00jack)

On 27 May 1864, Nelson Bailey was shot in the bowels in the Battle of Dallas. He died of his wounds at the regimental hospital. Nelson Bailey was one of those 10-12 men Col. Jackson says were wounded or killed that day. That gut shot sealed his fate – even today, a shot to the abdomen is difficult to treat.
To know, thanks to Colonel Jackson, that he may have died in what he thought to be friendly fire, is… it leaves me speechless.
Born in Ohio, Nelson was buried on Mr. Hill’s plantation 900 yards east of Dallas, Georgia.
His son, Joseph Bailey, was born in the autumn of that year, a testament to the beauty of life (or the beauty of a veteran furlough).

As a genealogist, we want to ascribe the greatest of motives and character to our ancestors. Maybe Nelson was overjoyed to see his wife and kids on that furlough, and his youngest child was named in his memory. Maybe Eliza was heartbroken that her husband perished. Maybe Nelson could read, and his dying thoughts were of a letter he’d received telling him Eliza was with child.
Then again, maybe Nelson was raging asshole, and Eliza was happy he would not return. Maybe she named Joseph for his father and grandfather out of guilt for her hatred of a man who took advantage of her and her bastard son.
We’ll probably never know.
I’d like to believe the former.

So what of tomorrow? I can’t find Mr. Hill or his plantation in 1860 or 1870. There’s no telling where Nelson was buried.
I’m going to Marietta National Cemetery. Built on the land of a man who refused to sell his land for a Confederate capitol for $50,000, the cemetery is a sea of nearly identical headstones, only 61% photographed. Nelson was moved there from Mr. Hill’s plantation and, unlike his wife, he has a grave. No image is available of it online. Reason suggests that Eliza never went there, nor did her children – these are kids who never knew their dad, never got drug along to his grave, never had to ride an hour in the car to see a fancy engraved stone.

We’ve all seen the Memorial Day posts that say, “Gone, but not forgotten.” The thing is, Nelson was forgotten. For generations, we knew nothing about him. His grave was never tended by loved ones. There is no family history of an ancestor that died in the Civil War. There is no photo, and there have been no flowers or flags except as a perfunctory part of a memorial service.
There aren’t even any Ancestry trees. I suspect that his two younger children died in the early 1880s, cast out after their mother’s death from the home of a stepfather who was in the same Company C of the 63d OVI – and survived. It took months to even find his name, and months more to discover his fate. When I found him on FindAGrave, there was no birth date listed. Even the manager of his online memorial is a stranger to him.

Tomorrow, we drive in the footsteps it took weeks to walk, from Snake Creek to Resaca, down west to Van Wert then east to Dallas. It’s not much, but it is an honor.
My two living children and I will be the first of his direct descendants to visit his grave. It is an intimidating honor to represent his last known blood line and photograph his headstone.
Many genealogists visit cemeteries to learn about their ancestor. That is not my goal.
There will be flowers. It’s the very most I can do to show beauty in a horrific death, yet the very least I can do as a token memorial for a man I’ll never truly know.