Just when I think that I've moved up one notch in my search, I slide back two!  Even though I am pretty well convinced that Henry D. Sherman and Mary Ellen Watkins are my g-grandparents, some of the information that I have found (but not yet verified) may be upsetting to other descendents of this line.  Since I will not be satisfied with less than the truth, I feel that I am committed to sharing that information--even though I jumped the gun with my first family tree posted on Ancestry.com.  I listed a lineage that went all the way back to England, but I mistakenly included Adam Sherman as my g-g.  I have since made that tree private so that I can use this blog to explore my findings.

So here I am, having found Henry and Mary in the 1860 census (and also having found four entries on the 1860 Slave Schedule).  This was not a surprise to me, given the times and the location of their lives.  Sherman was almost as common a name in the South as "Smith" was in the North.  Since our line is well-represented among farmers in Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee, it would have been more startling if our ancestor had joined the Union cause.  

There are a number of Shermans buried in battlefield cemeteries, including one in Chatanooga identified only as Sherman, with no given name or birthdate, so I am going to follow that clue.

But if the event that so embittered Samuel W. was not being orphaned by the Civil War, but some more personal occurence, that may be cause for dismay…

Why mention it now?  Simply because I am still searching for the event that caused grandfather Samuel William to be so reluctant to talk about his family's past.