It's Easter, and I found the golden egg!  It's Christmas, and my stocking runneth over!  It's March 5, and I have found my great-grandfather!  Well, maybe not totally, but I have nailed his identity.  Awww, all right, I didn't— but a friendly genealogist at the downtown Mahon Library did.  After twenty years of my desultory poking around, she took only thirty minutes to bring a book off the shelves, entitled Marriages in Shelby County, Tennessee, 1820-1888, compiled by Edythe Ruckeer Whitley.  And there it was: item 532 on page 11—the marriage record of Henry D. Sherman and Mary E. Hawkins on March 2, 1846.  Incredible!

Then she produced an index to the 1860 US Census (which I had looked for a number of times) and there it was: in Madison, TN,an entry for Henry, now age 33, Mary 32, Ellen (Ella) 10, Edwin 8 and Thomas 6. Little Samuel would be born in 1861, and Lulu in 1863, and sometime after 1863, the parents died, and by 1870, according to that Census, the surviving children were living with their uncle, Adam Sherman, at Stewart's Store in Mississippi.  Then Samuel and Lulu moved in with big sister Ella and her husband William L. Manly, where they are found in 1880.  It all fits! Maybe the time spent with Uncle Adam was difficult, and that's why we always thought that Sam had been raised by big sister Ella.

Just goes to show that sometimes the answers are right under our noses, but we have to have a trained smeller to find them out.  I need to verify these sources, but this indeed looks very, very promising.

Family lore had someone named Henry Sherman going off to fight the Civil War.  Guess it was G-Grandpa.  Now, if we can find out what happened to G-Grandmother Mary, we will be well on our way to establishing the bare bones of our heritage and get down to the fun stuff of finding out the "rest of the story."