The Cannon siblings

Cyntha O. Cannon (1800-1855) married Micajah Clack Rogers (1795-1873.)  She was the eldest of 8 children who all lived to be adults.

Let's discover what her siblings' lives were like.  Here and here were some blogs I've written about her before, focusing mainly on her husband.

I mentioned how grateful I was that some ancestors kept good records in the Rogers Family Bible.  Here's a little information about it from my own research.

The Rogers Family Bible was published in 1848, and begins with going back to Sevier County TN records of Rogers and Clack families. Micajah Rogers is listed as Col. and it covers his 11 children, but not his siblings.  It kept good track of the Rogers and Gibbs births, marriages and deaths from 1848 onwards and was eventually kept in the Gibbs family.

On Sept 14 1848, his son George Washington Rogers married Lucinda Gibbs, in Bienville, LA.  All the George W. and Lucinda Rogers children were born in Bienville, LA.  (But Lucinda at some time came to Huntsville  TX where she died in 1884)

Now looking at the Cannon family, the parents were William Henry Cannon (1771-1868 and Catharine Henderson (1777-1827) both coming from Virginia to Sevier County Tennessee by around 1786.  They married in 1799.

Cyntha at age 19, married Micajah at age 23.  In the Rogers Family Bible, "Cyntha Cannon, Daughter of William and Catharine Cannon, were married at the residence of William Cannon, in Sevier County, Tennessee, February 4th, 1819."

Cyntha's youngest sister was born in 1820, the same year she had her first son, my ancestor, George Washington Rogers.

1) But let's go in chronological order.  The younger sibling born after Cyntha was John Overton Cannon (1803-1848) He was buried in Madisonville, Monroe County, TN.

The City of Madisonville originally began as the town of Tellico, and prior to that a Cherokee village of the same name. The Calhoun Treaty and resulting Hiwassee Purchase of 1819 opened the area for white settlement. Madisonville was founded in the early 1820s as a county seat for Monroe County, which had been formed in 1819. The town was initially known as "Tellico," but its name was changed to "Madisonville" in 1830 in honor of U.S. President James Madison in accordance with a petition from the residents presented by state representative James Madison Greenway.^[10] Madisonville was incorporated on May 16, 1850. Wikipedia.

He married Caroline Nelson in Knoxville TN in 1827...Knoxville is about 20 miles from where he was born in Sevierville.  They had two children Guildford (1834-39) and John Jr. (1837-75) and then Caroline died in 1839 and was buried in Madisonville TN.

In 1842 he remarried to Mahala Torbett in Monroe County TN. and they had a son, Willie, in 1845. John died in 1846 leaving Mahala a widow with a 4 year old son and probably a 9 year old step-son John Jr. (1837-1875).

This is how I get diverted...I had to go look at John Jr.'s record to see if he indeed stayed with Mahala after his father's death. His 1850 census record shows he has gone to Constable William Cannon's household (his 32 year old uncle, with his wife 34 year old wife Catharine, and children) in Overton County TN. But wait, Uncle William wasn't married to a Catharine, and in 1850 lived in Sevier County TN.  See, now I have that problem to figure out...but I'm going back to Mahala, whether she had her step son living with her or not!

She was from another south-eastern Tennessee county, Blount County, and died in 1882 in Bradly County.  Their son died before she wrote her will, because she instructs that a monument be errected between their graves on May 28, 1882. She also leaves a sum of money from a trust to her church, the Methodist Episcopal Church South.  And she leaves her brother some furniture, and designates a nephew, Willie Roberts to keep the articles she has already given him. She designates a trust account that will have interest paid annually to her church and the pastor from the sale of her land and property, which she also wants her brother James to be able to cultivate.  I got a bit confused about the orders of rental and sales of the same land.

2) The next brother of Cyntha was Guilford Cannon (1806-1873) who became a doctor.  He married twice, and had 4 children, the last one dying within her first year.  He also was buried in Madisonville, Monroe County, TN.

3) Next child of William and Catharine Cannon was Nancy Cannon (1808-1844), who married Col. Matthew Bogle. They had one son who died at 2 years. Nancy is buried in Blount County, TN.  Her husband was about 17 years older than she was, and died in 1847.  He apparently remarried to a Mary in 1845 after Nancy's death.

4) Cyntha's next sibling was Rebecca Henderson Cannon (1812-1901) who married James Madison Sharp Sr.  He actually outlived her by a few years! In 1900 they were living with their son John, and his family in Sevier County, TN.

John Sharp	52 head
Mary K Sharp	33
William P Sharp	21
Mary R Sharp	19
Bettie L Sharp	17
Johnie Sharp	12
Ruben T Sharp	5
James M Sharp	83
Rebecca H Sharp	88 sister of Cyntha Cannon Rogers

Rebecca and James Sharp had 4-5 children.
** Her obituary is at the end of this post.

5) Next comes Mariah Louisa Bonaparte Cannon Earnest (1814-1851).  She and Joseph Hammer Earnest (1807-1878) had 4 children. She died in Chucky, Greene County, TN and is buried in the Methodist Episcopal church burying ground.

6) Next is younger brother William Henderson Cannon, (1817-1901).  He married twice and had 2 children.  He died in Sevier County, TN.

It appears that William Henderson Cannon was first a U.S. Postmaster in Sevier County, Tennessee, and later for the Confederate States of America.  Because his position was a political appointment, he was not covered under the parole of Confederate soldiers and had to apply individually for a pardon, which was granted by President Andrew Johnson.  The following information is from http://genealogytrails.com/tenn/sevier/post.htm.

His obituary is posted at the bottom of this page...***

7)  Cyntha's youngest sister was Martha Caroline Cannon Ernest, (1820-1847).  Her husband (also called her consort) was Nicholas Washington Earnest (1815-1866). They had 4 children,

• William (1841-1845) 
• John Guilford (1842-1932) 
• Maria R. (1844-) 
• Rebecca Catherine (1846-1925) 

They were buried in the Ebeneezer Methodist Burying ground in Chucky, Green County, TN.

And how were Mariah's and Martha's husbands named Earnest related?  Well, I checked with Joseph Earnest, and found he remarried twice after Mariah's death in 1851...to Ann Rebecca Barnett and then Lavinia Smith.  And there it is! He had a brother Nicholas Washington Earnest born in 1815.  There were an even dozen siblings in that family.


** Obituary of Rebecca Cannon Sharp (that is "Mrs. James Sharp Dead" as title)

*** Obituary of William Henderson Cannon 

 

Yes they owned other people and profited through them

Slavery.
Ugly word.
Ugly practice.

Some of those who owned other people believed they cared for them.  They deluded themselves that taking care of people who worked for them meant enough care and love.  They deluded themselves that the Blacks were better off being slaves.
No way.
No person should lack the same freedoms that our country was founded upon.

I've long tried to be reasonable about all the other aspects of the Civil War, since so many of our Southern Families fought and many men died for the things the South stood for.  I doubt highly that anyone was out there shooting Yankees because they wanted to keep their slaves.

But the long and the short of it is that all those who fought for the Confederacy not only were fighting for their own livelihood, their own families, but for the big illusion that had given wealth to a few, and not a fair competition in the world marketplace, but an unfair advantage of so much "free labor."

Once that the slaves were freed, their labor suddenly was costly.  The South never recovered.  Neither did the free slaves.  And neither did their owners.

I think of how our economy is so messed up these days.  Nobody is a slave, but there are certainly a lot of people living in poverty, who still work two jobs at minimum wage and barely get by.  There is again a great disparity between a small group of very rich people, and they make sure to keep the poor where they are.

On a more personal level...I like looking at my ancestors.  And as I dig through their correspondence I am finding the Southern voice.  One great great grandfather wrote following the Civil War to his brother, and then wrote to President Andrew Johnson.  His letters are long and full of his thoughts.  He was a man of some consequence, having lived through the Civil War, and actually having military duty during the War of 1812.  He was 70 when he wrote his brother in 1866. He bemoans the end of the Civil War as causing more pain for the freed slaves, as well as their masters, and one of these days I'll type it out because his writing is very hard to read.  It's on his Ancestry page, written to his brother.

I try to understand his point of view.

Then I scanned some documents which were sent to my grandmother who lived in Galveston and Houston Texas, born in 1886, and she asked her uncle to tell her about some of her ancestors.  He wrote that her grandfather, William Phillips, who died as a Confederate soldier in the Civil War, was the son of a man "who traded in Negroes with his brother."  The brother lived in Virginia, and he lived in Georgia, which was where William was born.  William's father had died and his mother remarried, and they all settled in Texas.

I'd really like to forget that phrase "they traded in Negroes" again.

But I won't, and I can't.

My white privilege means I can stand up and say how bad that makes me feel.  I had many ancestors who sold other people of another race, who profited from the mindset and business that perpetrated slavery.

I had known my ship captain, another great great grandfather, Alexander G. Swasey Jr,  had transported some slaves from Charleston SC to New Orleans, LA, from the ship manifests which he signed.  But that didn't feel as if he was actually doing the business of profiting by slavery.  Not true.  He was part of a system that was as bad in its day as the racism that still is around today.  In between has been the Klu Klux Klan...and Jim Crow laws and illegal practices of racism run rampant.

So even though these people are individually guilty of their outrageous part in the system of slavery, the system is the problem.

I say again, the system of racism is the problem.  There is a lot of institutionalized racism, where everyone closes their eyes/ears to practices that demonstrate this ugliness still...or may tut-tut about it, but don't do anything to change it.

These ancestors are long gone, and their spirits are telling me that I need to stay aware of the systems that I don't pay enough attention to today.  Many of today's systems mirror the slavery of the south in 1860.

Yes, there are certainly some almost invisible systems still eroding our freedoms.  People who march for their rights are usually talking about these systems.

Can you think of a few of them?

On May 29, 2018, Rosanne Barr's show was canceled by ABC, because she tweeted a racist statement about an African American woman who was advisor to President Obama.  

Micajah's family

Let's look at another branch of my ancestors!
The Puritans of New England have captured my attention for weeks, from where grandmother Ada Swasey Rogers hailed!

How about the rest of the early immigrants?

The Rogers, mainly came into the Virginia colony.

The Booths of my mothers family however, also arrived in New England..

Where to next?  OK, throw a pin at the map?
And there are all those little green leaves all over my Ancestry trees.  So it will be easy. Except I was looking on a rainy Memorial Day, and Ancestry must not have been able to handle all the traffic that was coming through...slow!

Micajah Clack Rogers married Cyntha Cannon Rogers.  I've posted about both of them before, but let's look at all their children today.  Background may be found HERE or Here.

They certainly had a lot of children, but many died in childhood.

Micajah moved first to Texas from Sevierville TN by 1846 without Cyntha.  He and Cyntha had had 11 children, all born in Sevier County TN.  He brought the older children along to first Louisiana, then some continued with him to Walker County Texas.

More about Cyntha and the children was posted earlier Here. 

I just dug out boxes at the bottom of the closet, found the xerox copies of old letters saved first by my grandmother Ada Phillips Rogers, then my sister, Mary Rogers Miller. I knew there was one written by Micajah to Cyntha about how he was sending some of the younger children back to Sevierville , TN (?) because there was no school yet in Texas...a frontier if you will.  But alas, it has been lost in all the traveling around either by the letters themselves, or myself, a wandering Rogers.    And now that I think about it, perhaps Cyntha was in Louisiana by that time, and the schools that were set up by then were the attraction.

Micajah's oldest son married and lived in Bieneville Parish, Louisiana, the Gibbs family of South Carolina had 2 adults who married into Rogers family.

So who would have been the youngsters who might have still needed education? (And you can read from Micajah's letters that he was certainly well educated himself...though his father, Rev. Elijah Rogers, was spoken of by his descendants as being illiterate.)

1.) George Washington Rogers, (1820-1864) married Luci (Lucinda Benson) Gibbs in 1848, and their first son (my great grandfather William Sanford Rogers) was born in Walker County TX in 1850.

2nd son: William Lawrence Rogers (1822-1887) moved to Hamilton County TN by the time he started his family in 1844 (that's the Chattanooga area).  His 1850 census reports he is a farmer with a wife and 3 daughters, but by the 1860 census he is living by himself with a family named Powell and he was a Clerk of Court.  He died from diabetes apparently, in Knoxville in 1887.

3. Catharine Louisa, (June 1824- Oct. 1829), who only lived her 5 years in Sevier County TN.

4. Nancy Terrissa Rogers Gibbs, (1826-1856) married Thomas Gibbs in Huntsville, Walker County TX in 1847.  Thomas was the older brother of Luci who married George Rogers. He and Nancy had 2 children who lived to adulthood.  When Nancy died with the live birth of her third child in Texas, he married Mary Blake, and had 4-6 more children.

5.  Elijah Lafayette Rogers (1829-1850) moved to Texas with his father, and became the Postmaster of Huntsville, Walker County from July until Dec. when he died at age 21. His father, Micajah became Postmaster following him. Elijah didn't marry.

6. Amelia Amanda Adelia Rogers only lived 11 months, from 1831-1832.  What a lovely alliterative name!

7. Mary Narcisa Francis Rogers 1883-1858 moved to Texas by the time she was 17 for the 1850 census.  But she had a short life, and was buried in her family plot not in Walker County but in Mount Lebanon, Bienville, LA.

She is the first child that might have been considered to need to return to a place with a school.  The Mount Lebanon families also may have been starting some institutions of higher learning, as many of the church societies not only formed communities around their church, but started schools as well.

8. Cynthia Minerva Rogers (1833-1856) also moved south from Tennessee,  being in Texas for the 1850 census at age 15, but dying and being buried 6 years later in Mount Lebanon, Bieneville Parish, LA.  I think she also may have moved back to Mount Lebanon for educational purposes.

9. Next came the three infants who died very young: first poor little Henry Clay Rogers, who lived from 17 May 1838 until 4 Sept 1838.

10. Rebecca Emaline Josephine Rogers just lived from 4 July 1839 to 16 Oct 1839.

11. Guilford Cannon Harrison Rogers only lived from 1 March 1841 till 21 July 1841. 

I am so grateful that the Rogers Family Bible included all the births marriages and deaths of these ancestors in my family.  

My oldest son, Marty

Roger Martin, my firstborn, came into the world on this day about 54 years ago.  What a long and wonderful time this has been.

 With George Rogers, in Houston TX around Nov-Dec 1964.  Grandfather was just 50. Marty around 6 mos.

Doug on left, is Marty's father.  Doug's parents are Norm Heym (center) then Marty about 2 years old, then Mary Hillyer Heym, on right. 

Marty cuddles to his grandmother Mataley Rogers holding Marty's new little brother, Russ born Aug 1967

Marty with his Aunt Mary Miller, holding little brother Russ

 While Russ slides banister, Marty talks with cousin Lisa (blond with back to camera).  Aunt Mary is looking at something while her son Zach sits at her feet (wearing blue shirt). Again waiting to go into a restaurant for lunch...this time in San Jacinto, Texas.

 

That's one picture for each year!

I hope this birthday is great for you, dear son...and that you have many more happy years!  I love you SO MUCH!