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Author and Novelist Glynn Young

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Tracing the Life of an Ancestor Isn’t Easy—or Always Accurate

January 25, 2023 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

Oral history may not be particularly trustworthy.

My father was four years old when his paternal grandfather died, so any direct memories he would have had were likely dim. He told me the story, passed down by his father, that his grandfather Samuel Young had fought in the Civil War for the Confederacy, had found himself stranded somewhere in the east when the war ended in 1865, and made his way home primarily by walking. My father said “the Youngs were a family of shopkeepers,” and had lived and worked around Brookhaven in northern Pike Country, and they had owned no slaves. (Pike was a large county; during Reconstruction it was split into two counties, Pike and Lincoln.)

When his grandfather reached home near Brookhaven, Mississippi, my father said, he discovered the family was gone. Neighbors said the entire family had fled to East Texas to escape the devastation of war and Union control. He continued his trek across Louisiana and eventually found his family. At some point, the family returned to Mississippi. My father also told me, again passing down the family story from his father, that Samuel had been too young to enlist, and so became a messenger boy. 

The only possible reference I’ve been able to find in Confederate war records to a Samuel Franklin Young is a listing for S.F. Young – but it’s a man from a far northern country in Mississippi, whereas my ancestor would have been listed for Pike County, which was in southern Mississippi on the Louisiana line. 

That’s as much as I knew about my great-grandfather. It turns out that much of it is likely wrong.

The family listing in the 1850 census

The first question involves Samuel’s age. His tombstone in a cemetery near Alexandria, Louisiana, says he was born Jan. 22, 1845. The 1850 U.S. census lists his age as 7 years, 7 months, which would make his birth year 1843. The records in the family Bible, which I have, and which were written by Samuel himself, say his birth year was 1846. Another record says 1847.

All of those possible dates, except possibly the last one, are problematic for the “too young to enlist” in the war statement from my father. By 1863, the conscription age for the Confederate Army was 16.

Then I discovered this on one of the popular genealogy sites – another bit of family oral history from a grandson of Samuel through another descendant’s line. 

The grandson remembered his grandfather telling stories about his life. Samuel had been born on the Lake Plantation east of Johnston Station in Pike County. His father Franklin owned the plantation and 17 slaves (Franklin is listed as “farmer” on the 1850 census). His father was also involved in building the fill or rail bed for the Illinois Central Railroad from Johnston Station to Summit, Mississippi (the station and line were constructed in 1857).

Samuel, “as was the custom in the family,” was called James Samuel, Clarence Samuel, Samuel Franklin, and simply Samuel. 

Then there’s this: Samuel was drafted during the Civil War, but his father paid a substitute $500 and a horse and saddle to take his son’s place. Later, Samuel was drafted anyway, enlisted in the cavalry, and “fought the Indians west of the Mississippi River.” After the war, Franklin supposedly lost his plantation “to the carpetbaggers,” and the family settled elsewhere in Pike County and worked as sharecropper farmers. Samuel later went to work in a sawmill. 

Samuel’s tombstone

There are a lot of problems with those statements. It’s unlikely Samuel would have been called “James Samuel;” he had an older brother named James who died in 1860. His name is listed as “Samuel Franklin Young” in the Bible, and his signature (also in the Bible) is Samuel F. Young. I’m not sure where Clarence came from. And for the Civil War service “fighting the Indians,” Samuel’s other older brother Wylie served in the Confederate military and died in Texas in 1863.

I suspect either Samuel or his grandson combined some stories, or the grandson’s memory combined the stories. But most of this runs counter to my own father’s memory, or at least his recall of what he understood about his grandfather. And a reader recently pointed out that his great-grandfather had also been too young to enlist and served as a messenger boy for the Confederate post office.

And who knows what name Samuel served in the army under? His own? Clarence? James? And perhaps my father, and I by extension, misunderstood the meaning of “messenger boy” and assumed it was military. And here I thought I had all the facts.

What I know for certain about my great-grandfather: he was born in 1845 or 1846 in Johnston Station, Mississippi. He served somewhere in the Confederate Army. At his death in 1920, he was living with an unmarried daughter named Myrtle Young outside Alexandria, La., and he is buried in a cemetery there. He and his wife Octavia had nine children, seven of whom survived to adulthood. Octavia died in 1887, and Samuel never remarried.

It’s back to the records to see what other facts I can find or corroborate. 

Top photograph: Samuel and Octavia Young about 1880.

When You Face Too Many Ways to Open a Novel

November 16, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

How many openings can a novel have? Let me count the ways.

I’d never experienced the problem of too many ways to open a novel. Five novels, and five fairly straightforward beginnings, meant that I never struggled over how to open a story. Somehow, I always knew, and it wasn’t an issue.

Until now.

I began to write the draft like I always had. I had an idea, and image, in my mind, and that’s how I’d start the story. I wrote it. I read it over several times. It seemed to work. I started writing beyond the opening, and I bogged down. 

Something seemed slightly off, and I knew it was the opening. So, I reworked it. And reworked it. I revised it to the point where it was almost unrecognizable from the first version. It still didn’t work. I discarded it and started over. I tried something entirely different. At one point, I thought I had it, finally, only to realize I didn’t. I went back to the first and tried it again.

To continue reading, please see my post today at ACFW. 

Photograph by Ankhesenamun via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“War and Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1861-1875” by Charles Mills

September 12, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

During the Great Depression in the 1930s, the U.S. government’s Works Projects Administration undertook a number of efforts to help the unemployed retain their skills. While critics saw it as creating a huge army loyal to President Roosevelt, the WPA did employ some 8.5 million people in a wide variety of areas. 

One of those efforts was the Writers’ Project, which, among other projects, produced travel guides to cities and states across the United States. Writers also collected oral histories of still-living Americans who had experienced extraordinary events, like the Civil War.

War and Reconstruction in Mississippi 1861-1875 was one such work. It focused on the town of Holly Springs in Marshall County, in the northern part of the state. Holly Springs was noteworthy for a number of reasons, not least of which was that it had changed hands 57 times during the Civil War. Before the war, it had been a prosperous town in a planter- and slave-based economy. During the Reconstruction period, it was occupied by a federal garrison and experienced Republican political control. 

The WPA document assembled a history of the town and its founding, its experiences during the war as recounted by still living inhabitants, the role of Freedman’s Bureau during Reconstruction, and how the former Confederates eventually regained political control by stuffing the ballot box for the Democrats. 

The document was edited and republished by Charles Mills in 2010. While some 60 to 70 years intervened between the events and how people remembered them, it still remains a valuable resource for what people on all sides experienced during the war and what followed.

Charles Mills

Mills is also the author of Gold, Murder and Monsters in the Superstition Mountains, Legends of the Superstition Mountains, Death and Delusion in the Superstition Mountains, Treasure Legends of the Civil War, Love, Sex and Marriage in the Civil War, Civil War Civilian Life: Manassas, Virginia (Battle of Bull Run), and several other works on historical subjects. He is the producer and co-host of Virginia Time Travel, a TV program seen by two million viewers in northern Virginia, which is also where he lives (on land once owned by George Washington). 

Top photograph: The New York Herald of Nov. 7, 1862, describing the expected move of Gen. Grant’s army southward toward Holly Springs. 

A History Lesson about Gettysburg, and More

June 22, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I’ve been reading some of the books in the battle series published by Emerging Civil War. So far, I’ve read about Shiloh (1862), Gettysburg (1863), and the Battle of the Wilderness (1864). It was while reading this third one that the author mentioned something as almost an offhand comment that threw me – and upended something I believed for 50 years.

The book was Hell Itself: The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5-7, 1864 by Chris Mackowski, but the comment was about Gettysburg. At the time of the battle in 1863, he said, “No one recognized Gettysburg as anything other than a setback, and certainly no one looked at it as the ‘High Water Mark of the Confederacy.’”

John and Elizabeth Bachelder at Gettysburg battlefield in 1888.

How it gained that reputation was due to a marketing-savvy photographer, lithographer, and Gettysburg historian named John Badger Bachelder, who was a tireless promoter of the Gettysburg Battlefield and worked to promote the site as a tourist destination.

In other words, the whole idea of Gettysburg as the turning point in the Civil War came from a promoter for the battlefield, decades after the battle was fought.

I can remember from my primary (and college) education how the Battle of Gettysburg was described – the turning point in the Civil War, the high-water mark of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and the beginning of the end of the Confederacy. And this wasn’t something that was taught and understood half a century ago, and we’ve all gotten a lot wiser since then. No, the belief still has considerable legs. See, for example, how the history site Battlefields.org describes it in the first sentence. The Wikipedia entry for the battle notes it that way as well, but includes a note about “turning points” – that there is widespread disagreement among historians. In fact, historians now point to 13 or 14 turning points in the Civil War, some of them being Confederate victories. Go figure.

Gettysburg was an important battle, to be sure. Coupled with the fall of Vicksburg at almost exactly the same time, it portended a change in the Union’s fortunes. But the war continued for almost two more years, and it still wasn’t finished until Lee surrendered at Appomattox in April 1865 and General William Johnston surrendered two weeks later in Greensboro, North Carolina.

The ”Gettysburg as turning point” story is a reminded that we should never automatically use one event as the critical one in a war, or (even worse) in a nation’s history. Our Constitution, for example, wasn’t invented from whole cloth in a room in Philadelphia one summer, but instead developed through the 1760s, 1770s, the American Revolution, and the 1780s. Elements of our Constitution can be traced back to the Magna Carta and the Roman Republic (especially the writings of Cicero). We have the First Amendment largely thanks to John Milton. 

History turns out to be more complicated than we realize, and certainly more complicated than battlefield promoters would have us believe.

Top illustration: Battle of Gettysburg by Thure de Thulstrap.

Family History as a Source for Stories

May 25, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

A single comment by my father nearly six decades ago led to a story idea. 

“Your great-grandfather was too young to enlist in the Civil War,” he said. “So, he signed up as a messenger boy when he looked old enough to get away with it. And then he had to walk home when the war was over.” My father must have heard that from his father; he was four when his grandfather died, with no memories of him at all.

A year ago, when I decided I wanted to know more, any family member who might have known something was long buried. 

The records in the family Bible provided few clues. One of millions published by the American Bible Society in the 1870s, it included family records inserted between the Old and New Testaments. The earliest recorded date was 1803, the year of the Louisiana Purchase; it noted the birth of my great-great-grandfather. But almost all the entries, stretching from 1803 to the 1890s, were in the same hand, if different inks – my great-grandfather’s handwriting (my great-grandmother had died in the 1880s).

To continue reading, please see my post today at American Christian Fiction Writers.

When You Hit the Writing Wall

February 23, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I’ve learned there is more than one kind of writing block.

I’ve been blessed with never to have experienced writer’s block, that immobilization that often afflicts writers and stops them cold from writing another word. I’ve sympathized with people who’ve had it, and I know it’s real. They stare at a blank page or screen, and – nothing.

The sources of writer’s block are legion – stress, tension, deadlines, family tragedy, accidents, illness, writing one’s way into a dead end with no resolution, finances, success of a novel (creating high expectations for the next one), the end or beginning of a relationship, and more. F. Scott Fitzgerald had it. So did Herman Melville. So did composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. Writer’s block is so well known and so well-documented that there are scores of books on the subject, classes you can take, and writing coaches who can help guide you through it. 

Most writers experience it to one degree or another.

To continue reading, please see my post today at American Christian Fiction Writers.

Photograph by Ryan Snaadt via Unsplash. Used with permission.

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Meet the Man

An award-winning speechwriter and communications professional, Glynn Young is the author of three novels and the non-fiction book Poetry at Work.

 

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