Or, Subtitled: “A Fine and Dashing Young Man” (Who Died Too Young)

Dennis Edward Lindsey, son of Dennis Lindsey (1794-1836) and Jane Brooks, was born in 1836 prior to his father’s death in Lawrence County, Alabama, on 28 August of that year. When his mother Jane petitioned for her dower share of Dennis’s estate in November 1836, her petition states that her son Dennis (who is not given a middle name in these estate documents) was an infant.^[1] The 1850 federal census, which shows him living in the household of his widowed mother Jane at Oakville in Lawrence County, gives Dennis’s age as 14, placing his birth in 1836.^[2]