Aaaargh! Frustration! How does one find the missing link?

  Just when I thought that I had found our missing great-grandfather Sherman, I realized from the dates that he would have had to be 80 years old when my grandfather, Samuel William Sherman (1861-1937), was born.  Not impossible, I guess, but surely not likely.  So it looks as if the Adam Sherman (1789-1868) I found could have been a gg-grandfather, but I am back in the databases available online, looking for someone with reasonable dates, probably named Samuel or Adam or William, and born somewhere on a continuum from Tennessee/Mississippi back to Rhode Island.

I  only wish that I could nail down this Sherman line, so that I can begin hunting for more of the fun stuff like tall tales and legends and homesteads and occupations. 

Family legends are the "meat" of family history for me.  Oh, it's fun to wander through the pedigree charts and browse names and namesakes, but the real measure of a family is the web of truth and fantasy that is woven when its members tell their stories. 

One of my favorites comes from mother's side of my family and recounts the tale of a young girl orphaned in Georgia by a smallpox epidemic, adopted by the doctor's family, and subsequently brought to Texas. I'm not sure if they came in a covered wagon, but when I wrote the story in my collection, COMING OR GOING, that was their means of transportation.  So, Great Grandmother Annie Bolton Hedges, if that's not really how you got here, you'll have to send me an ethereal email with corrections.  My version is the way I have always envisioned the story, having only bits of oral history to draw upon, and that is now how future generations will remember it (unless I receive corrections).  

One mystery that has prompted my sporadic genealogical searching over the years has its beginnings in my father's line.  In the South, Sherman has not been a much-revered surname, because of the arsonist tendencies of William Tecumsah, the general who laid waste to so many Confederate cities during the Civil War.  My father's knowledge of his Sherman forebears was incomplete.  He only remembered that as a child, when he questioned my grandfather, Samuel William, the response was only a terse, "Let sleeping dogs lie!"

But that was enough to trigger my need to know.  Was SW being secretive because we were related to the infamous torchman?  Or was there some crime or atrocity associated with the fact that Samuel William was orphaned at the age of six or seven? Without even knowing the given name of my great grandfather Sherman, the trail was cold indeed. 

Complicating the matter was the fact that census records were housed in the Memphis, Tennessee courthouse, which was burned by Gen. W. T. Sherman. How's that for a really ironic twist to the story?

Anyway, these posts will be primarily concerned with my search for the missing links in the Sherman lineage.  At this point, the finding of Samuel William's brother Adam, in an 1870 Mississippi census just across the stateline from Memphis, (by a Sherman cousin Leslee in Oregon) has opened possibilities that are promising.

Even if Sherman is not a surname in your own line, or you are one of those who think genealogists should get a life of their own, I promise that you will find this account of my search filled with interesting stories of what was and what might have been.

Some people get into genealogy in hopes of finding a famous ancestor, but the lure for me is the search.  Looking for a lost ancestor is the electronic equivalent of searching for the  Holy Grail--even if there is no reward at the end, it is the process that inspires.