
I’m always suspicious of Facebook messages coming from people I don’t know. If it seems that a message might possibly be legitimate, I’ll check the person’s profile page. More often than not, it’s people from Hong Kong or the Philippines or Africa, or people who names and profile photos clearly don’t match. Click delete.
A few weeks ago, one arrived that raised my suspicions, but the sender seemed legitimate. And he was. He asked me if I was the author of this article at Emerging Civil War: “Research for a Novel Upended a Family Legend.” Yep, that was me.
He said he had an interesting story to tell me, and we eventually connected by phone.

Some weeks before, he’d been in an antique store in Paris, Texas, north of the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He collects Civil War memorabilia, and he’d found a medal with a serial number on the back.
The medal was a Cross of Military Service. It had been awarded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDAC) to veterans whose ancestors fought in the Civil War and who themselves were veterans of World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War, and/or the Global War on Terror. He said finding a medal like this was highly unusual, because families tended to hold on to them, even after the awardee’s death.
He contacted the UDAC and learned that this one was even more unusual – it had been awarded to a woman for her service in both World War II and Korea. Her name was U.S. Army Major Ruby Edwina McCain. She was born in 1913 and died in 1991. The UDAC was able to tell him that her Civil War ancestor was Jarvis Seale, born in 1824 in Amite County, Mississippi, and died in 1862 at the Battle of Shiloh. Ruby was his great-granddaughter.
The man who found the medal went looking for Jarvis Seale, and what did he find but my article at Emerging Civil War.

For a long time, Jarvis Seale was the mystery man in the Young family Bible records. No one knew why he was there. Family Search eventually revealed the reason – he had married a Martha Young, the oldest sister of my great-grandfather Samuel, who originally bought the Bible and entered all of the family records. Samuel would have known his brother-in-law and remembered him in the Bible. Samuel also lost his two older brothers in the war.
What puzzled my new friend was what had puzzled several people – why was Jarvis listed in Find-a-Grave and Family Search as buried in a cemetery in Clarksville, Texas? The fact is, he wasn’t. He was buried in one of several mass graves for Confederate dead at Shiloh. At some point years later, one of his daughters moved with her husband to Clarksville, and she had placed a memorial stone there in the family plot. That was two mysteries solved – the Bible’s mystery name and the Texas gravestone.
Ruby McCain was from Clarksville. Her grandmother had been the one to arrange for the memorial stone. Clarksville is about 20 miles south of the Oklahoma border, and 30 miles east of Paris, Texas, where Ruby’s medal ended up. Our best guess is that a relative (Ruby had no children) had included the medal in an estate sale or given it away, and it ended up in the antique store.
Jarvis and Martha furnished their names for characters in my novel Brookhaven. A medal, a memorial stone, and a book brought them back from the past, facilitated by Facebook messenger and a phone call.