A young attorney was gone too soon

William Booth home, built around 1856.  His son, Richard was raised there.

I'd like to feature my second great grandfather on my mother's tree...Richard R. Booth (1846-1879). He was an attorney like his father, His father, William Lewis Booth, outlived many of his children and their spouses, dying at age 76.

Richard R. Booth was born Indiana to the second wife of his father, Hannah Conn Booth. William's first wife, Mary Ann McManus Booth gave birth to three children and died at only 24 years of age. She died in July 1842 (as well as the 3rd child who was 5 months old.)  Hannah was married to William in Febrary 1843. Hannah Conn Booth gave birth to 8 children and lived to be 66, five of her children living to adulthood.

Hannah's son Richard was born on 23 Sept. 1846, her third child, while she had become stepmother for 2 others. At that time the Booths were living in Indiana, but by the next child's birth, the family had moved to Illinois along with William's brother Charles Booth's family. And by the 1850s the family moved to Hills County Texas. 

There are stories that William and Charles went to California for the gold rush with a nephew who stayed there. The older Booths returned to Texas.

Son Richard was happy to follow his father's education in becoming a lawyer. He is listed in several clippings about his involvement in Hillsboro's politics...with a brother and father, being delegates in the Republican Party. 

Father William was apparently a Colonel in the Confederacy, and regained his position in the community following the war. There's no record of Richard in the Confederate Army, but at 15 in 1861, he might well have, His older 3 brothers also must have taken part in the war. Very few able bodied men were excused, except the older ones who were considered "Home Guard." (Anyone in Texas who had not been in favor of the succession of the Confederacy either was killed or left town in a hurry. When the vote was taken in Austin, General Sam Houston may have been against succeeding, but he was able to hide it from those interested in war.)

Richard married Jemima Johnson in 1865, and they had one son in 1866. Then in 1868 Jemima died giving birth to their second son, who also died on that date. 

Richard married again in 1869, at age 22. Eugenia Almeta Whitty Booth was 17, having her first son in 1871.  They lived close to his father's family, and my great grandmother, Eugenia Almeta Booth Miller was born in Hillsboro TX in 1873. By 1875, mother Eugenia Almeta Whitty Booth gave birth to her third child, a girl, and they both died on July 13, 1875 in Hempstead, Waller County, Texas.  Richard apparently had moved there to work in the courts as well as his father. The children went back to Hillsboro where grandmother Hannah Booth lived still.

Richard Booth died in a gun fight at a tavern in the wee hours. Apparently he was shot by a deputy sherrif, who was a shady character with a lot of friends in town. He left town, and later was arrested for shooting some other people

You may have seen westerns portraying life in Reconstruction Texas following the Civil War...but I'm guessing they have all been pretty cleaned up for entertainment purposes. There were a lot of men who were strong believers in one side or another, and using guns to prove they were right. Law courts were busy with cases, and that's probably why William and Richard Booth moved with families to Hempstead, a growing metropolis of the times.

So his murderer only got 25 years in the penitentiary for murder of two other men. I am doubly sad that justice wasn't handed down, and R. T. Springfield probably lived a long life.

On a more positive note, I have a cousin who is a descendant of Richard's also, from a son of his first wife. Cheryl Richardson sent me a lot of good information about the Booth family.

Sharing this week with 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks over on FaceBook.

I can identify with my great grandmother

 

To choose one great grandmother, I'll choose the one I'm named after.

 Eugenia Almeda Booth Miller (1873-1936). When she was 2 years old her mother died in childbirth.. 

If I hadn't had the medical care that is now available for new mothers, my second son or myself might not have survived his birth. Or actually my first son wouldn't have lived to be a year old. And my third son (by Cesarean Section) wouldn't have survived either.  So many of my ancestresses died in childbirth.

William Booth Home, 208 N. Waco St. Hillsboro, TX, purchased land on 12 May 1855, (photo 1993)

Great grandmother Eugenia's father, Richard Booth, was an attorney who died in a gun violence outside a tavern when she was 6 years old. Since she had one older brother, and two older half brothers, it is likely that she had already gone to live with her father-in-law's family, the William Lewis Booths of Hillsboro, Texas. 

There she grew until somehow meeting a German immigrant who worked as a passenger conductor on the railroad, Charles Herman Mueller (Miller) (1868-1946). They married in 1897.

Of their 4 daughters, the oldest became my grandmother.

Sharing with...

Who was an outcast?

 Outcast is the suggestion for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks for this week.

Who should I consider an outcast in my ancestors? The  Captain of a Confederate ship that was imprisoned at the beginning of the Civil War? 

Dear old great great grandfather Alexander G. Swasey, the Captain of several ships out of Charleston, including transporting slaves to New Orleans from the caribbean and Charleston SC. I'm of course not proud of this information, but I refuse to delete it from my history. This is what happened. Several other ancestors may have also been involved in the trading of Afticans, but the documents have all disappeared, thanks to well meaning people who thought that they could feel better by denying that their ancestors did these things.

"Here's some verbiage based on what the docent at the Charleston Slave Mart told me.  I can't verify that my memory is totally correct, or the historical veracity of what he said without researching it more.  But this is my best recollection - feel free to edit however you want:

 

Captain Alexander G. Swasey was a ship captain as well as a Confederate blockade runner during the Civil War.  Although he was based for a time in Charleston, South Carolina (and ultimately died there), the historical record shows he made trips between Charleston, New Orleans, and the Caribbean.  According to information provided by a docent at the Charleston Slave Mart Museum, this was a common triangle for slave runners.  Once the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves took effect in 1808 (the earliest date permitted by the United States Constitution), slave states continued to smuggle slaves by claiming that any slave brought from Africa who even set foot in the Caribbean was no longer considered "imported."  Charleston and New Orleans were two of the most important slave ports at the time, so the triangle among those two cities and ports in the Caribbean would have been a common route for slave captains such as A.G. Swasey."

 

John Fitz Rogers

December 29, 2016

John F. Rogers is my first cousin, so has the same relationship to Captain Swasey.

Francis, age 30, slave transported from Charleston to New Orleans, as A.G. Swasey affirmed. 

A slave manifest from 1843 possibly. A.G. Swasey is "agent for F. M. Cotter."  My attempt at reading the initials of Mr. Cotter may be way off. I can however, read the ages from 50 down to 4 years old.

I also don't know anything about the Calluo, the ship for both of these trips. Captain Swasey was often in charge on ships owned by others, sometimes a group of merchants.

He also married and had 5 children in St. Augustine FL, from 1839 to at least 1853, when our great grandfather, Alexander John Swasey was born. Then he apparently moved and is listed in a census of 1856 in Newport, Rhode Island, where he had been born in 1812.

He was master (captain?) of the Ella Warley, a renamed sidewheeler originally the Isabel, that was a blockade runner for the Confederacy. The Union tried to keep the southern ports from sending or receiving goods with their blockade. Since the southern states had been the major source for cotton in Europe up till then, it sat in warehouses, and the Confederate families learned to live without imported items.

"The Steamship Isabel, Charleston, South Carolina, circa 1855 Oil on canvas 30 1/4 x 50 1/4 inches

This rendering of the steamship Isabel, which had a maritime career from 1848 to 1863, is a highly evocative representation of the maritime history of antebellum South Carolina and the Confederate States of America.

Commissioned by a group of Charleston business leaders, the Isabel was built in Baltimore, Maryland in 1847-1848. It was constructed specifically to serve the United States postal service, as well as coastal passenger trade, between the eastern United States and the Spanish colony of Cuba.

During the Civil War, the Isabel, renamed the Ella Warley, operated out of Charleston for two years as a blockade runner. Following its capture by the Union Navy in April 1862, the Ella Warley was purchased by a New York City shipping company. The illustrious ship’s career ended when it collided with another vessel and sank off Sandy Hook, New Jersey in February 1863.

Essay by the Charleston Renaissance Gallery.

(Note, this essay mistakenly gives the Isabel as the ship that rescued the Union Troops at Ft. Sumpter in 1861. At that time it was still a Confederate blockade runner until capture in April 1862.)

It's interesting to note that some military documents inferred that the Ella Waley had an opportunity to escape capture in Nassau.

"On the morning of the 2d inst. the ocean steamer Ella Warley, Capt. SWASEY, ran the blockade at Charleston, from Nassau, N.P. She was chased and fired on by the blockading squadron, without harm to her. Her passengers were all English and Scotch, except B.T. BISBIE, late a bearer of Confederate dispatches to Europe. The Nassau authorities forced the Flambeau out of the harbor to coal, which gave the Ella Warley the chance to escape."

SOURCE: NY Times printing of letters received at the Adjutant-General's office, from Brig.-Gen. SHERMAN, dated: HEADQUARTERS G.C., PORT ROYAL, S.C., Jan. 2, 1862.

Note again dates! This letter of Jan. 2 talks of the "2d inst" (meaning this month) when the Ella Warley ran the blockade. But General Sherman's missive to the Times was also dated Jan. 2nd. I wonder that it might have been any time from Nov. to Feb, since the Times could not receive messages even by ship in less than a few days. But apparently Captain Swasey did escape that time. But how did Sherman know the makeup of the passengers? Anyway, by April she was indeed captured by Union ships.

And my great great grandfather spent most of the rest of the next 3 years in a Union Prison, Fort Warren, on George's Island in Boston Harbor, MA. He somehow made it back to Charleston following release, and died a sick man on March 16, 1866.

Fort Warren

Shared with the FB group Generations Cafe' for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks.

Social Media and Ancestors

 I have had a blog with various postings of my ancestors since I retired in 2017. I had at that time, three separate family trees on Ancestry. That made my huge family trees more manageable for me. Only one grandparent didn't have any ancestors that I've been able to find...so these three represent my 3 grandparents.

Anyway, Three Family Trees had been publishing for about a year, when I received an email from someone who said her line of ancestry intersected mine.

That email led to many more as I learned that the younger sister of my 2nd Great Grandfather Captain Alexander G. Swasey was her ancestor. 

Ruth Ann Swasey married William Davenport James. And their descendent, Linda Clark contacted me in 2018. She's still updating her tree, because when she does, I get a notification by email from Ancestry.

Linda and I are 4th cousins. This internet is a place where we have shared our information on the lives that our ancestors lived. Who would have known how long this would have taken from all the old letters back and forth before 2000 or so. 

I'm linking this to 52 Ancestors 52 Weeks, Social Media

A  photo from a book publication Alexander G. Swasey (1812-1866) - describing how he had been Connfederate Captain of the early blockade runner Ella Warley from Jan. 1862 until her capture on April 25, 1862. He then spent the rest of the Civil War in a Union prison on an island in Boston Harbor.

Ruth A. Swasey James, (1828-1908) probably taken around 1900.

Sharing on FaceBook at Generation's Cafe.