A Crossroads Mid 1840's
Perhaps it is my romantic side, but I picture a dewey spring morning in
eastern Tennessee, smoke drifts up from a cooking fire. There are sounds
of livestock being fed, children running,their energies already aroused
by the early morning activities. People were moving everywhere,
Daniel Murley's family had passed this way in the late 1830's, they had stopped
down in Hardeman County where their son Jefferson Kasey
was born, now they are
moving on to Mississippi, in another year or so Jonathan Bradley and his
wife are going to pass this way going "out to the Arkansaw" followed by
his sister Catherine, the widow of late John Carroll Smith, and her
aging father Anselom Bradley, son-in-law to Andrew Hampton of Revolutionary
War fame. Then there were the Bartletts, they came from the same area the
Smiths and the Bradleys came from and they went the same way the Murleys
had gone. Narcissa Suttle Bartlett was destined to be a young, by our
standards, widow for less than 2 years after arrriving in Missiissippi
her husband Nathan would be dead, missing his daughter Susan's birth by
barely 12 days. Aunt Sissy would live until 1892, as far as I can tell,
unmarried. She had 7 children at his death, the oldest was 12. We for
the most part can only guess as to why these families went where they did.
But generally it was for land of their own and room to spread out. Most
of the time it wasn't just one family, but several, sometimes kinsman,
sometimes men with different skills, a carpentor, a cooper, a blacksmith,
most of them were farmers, at least of a sort, there would be maybe a
tinker, a tinsmith, a brick layer, a mason. Neighbor
would help neighbor, for the task of taming new country would be difficult
for a man or even a family, alone. In many cases it would take as much as
a day to travel a mile by land, cutting one's own path.
Chapter 5: My Grandparents
A Genealogy |
Chapter 3: Daniels Story |
Surname Index