This will be my final posting in this series about Patrick Ryan (1846-1893) and his Civil War pension file. If you’re just discovering this blog, you may want to read the whole series of which this is the final piece. What I want to do now is provide some footnotes to previous postings in the series. Continue reading “Prob. Died Young, Or How Pat Ryan Lost His Eye (As a Union Soldier) (9)”
I’m floundering a bit as I try to draw to a close this series of postings about Pat and Delilah Rinehart Ryan and their pension applications for Pat’s Civil War service and injuries. The problem is that the deeper I reach into the treasure trove of information this file contains, the more connections I’m spotting that I had never seen before. I’m discovering some of those as I share information with you here and try to document aspects of Pat Ryan’s story I had not previously sought to document. Continue reading “Prob. Died Young, Or How Pat Ryan Lost His Eye (As a Union Soldier) (8)”
More tying up loose ends from the Civil War pension files of my grandmother’s uncle Patrick Ryan and his wife Delilah Rinehart (if you’re just now seeing this series of posting, this is #7 in the series; you may want to click and read the preceding postings for background): Continue reading “Prob. Died Young, Or How Pat Ryan Lost His Eye (As a Union Soldier) (7)”
As I ended my last posting about the Civil War pension claims filed by Patrick Ryan and his widow Delilah Rinehart Ryan in Grant County, Arkansas, I mentioned that one of the threads tying together the network of families represented in these combined pension files is that men from several of these families were Union soldiers during the war —in a state that seceded from the Union, from families living in the central and southern part of Arkansas where Confederate sentiment was stronger than it was in the northern half of the state. As we’ve seen, Pat Ryan’s first wife Rosanna Hill Spann was the widow of John H. Spann, who served in the 3rd Arkansas Cavalry along with Pat Ryan, as did John Spann’s brother James Jasper Spann, who enlisted in Little Rock in Co. K of this Union unit on the same day that Pat Ryan did, 8 November 1863. Continue reading “Prob. Died Young, Or How Pat Ryan Lost His Eye (As a Union Soldier) (6)”
I’d like to begin winding down my series of postings about the Civil War pension files of Patrick Ryan and his wife Delilah Rinehart Ryan of Grant County, Arkansas, by tying up some loose ends I’ve left dangling in my four previous postings about these genealogically rich documents. As I do so, I’m fully aware that most of you don’t share my intense interest in the people mentioned in these files. How could you, when they aren’t your relatives and the connections of your kin? Continue reading “Prob. Died Young, Or How Pat Ryan Lost His Eye (As a Union Soldier) (5)”
You obtain an unexpected new treasure trove chock full of genealogical goodies, as I did last year when, at long last, I thought to look for a Union service record for my grandmother’s uncle Pat Ryan and discovered he and his widow Delilah Rinehart Ryan had filed pension applications for his Civil War service. You obtain a new genealogical treasure trove, and you have an entirely new genealogical problem on your hands. You’ve suddenly gone from knowing too little about one of your family members of the past to that dreaded internet scourge, TMI. Continue reading “Prob. Died Young, Or How Pat Ryan Lost His Eye (As a Union Soldier) (4)”
And now to that missing eye: though I have not spelled this out, it has probably become obvious to you if you’ve read the first two installments in this series that it is, in part, an extended essay about the importance of family stories in genealogical research. It’s a foray into understanding how family stories should be handled. Continue reading “Prob. Died Young, Or How Pat Ryan Lost His Eye (As a Union Soldier) (3)”
I’ve just shared postings tracing all I’ve been able to discover about an elusive Ulster Scots ancestor, David Dinsmore, who came from Ireland to South Carolina with his wife Margaret not long before the Revolution, took the British side during that war, and found himself exiled to Nova Scotia, leaving his wife and children behind in South Carolina. The backstory to those postings is that, for many years, my FGS for this family had neatly written, in the slot next to David’s date and place of death, the statement, “Prob. died young.” Continue reading “Prob. Died Young, Or How Pat Ryan Lost His Eye (As a Union Soldier) (1)”
Begats and Bequeathals 