IS THIS A PHOTO OF OUR GG-GRANDFATHER HILLIARD ASKEW ?

Always a surprise in this family history business – expect the unexpected!

Faithful visitors to our website will note that there has been a big pause in my postings.  I am catching up just a little bit now in dealing with a serious family illness—  plus, more recently,  I am trying to keep my 80-year-old body fed and  alive here in Miami, living all alone during the  ridiculous pandemic crisis.

But, something unusual has come up that really should be noted and discussed with some dispatch.

On the morning of July 15, 2020, I received a comment from a visitor to our website whose grandmother had the middle name Askew.  She had noted the recent Facebook posting of a stunning photo [see above] of a person whom the contributor identified as Hilliard Judge Askew. The geography in the photo’s Facebook annotation (western Alabama) synched with the geography of her grandmother’s family, and she started looking for information on this Hilliard to see if he or his Askew family possibly could have had anything to do with her grandmother. That Google search for the Hilliard in the photo led her to  our website at yer-roots-tracker.com .

With my kind reader’s guidance, I was able to locate the Facebook posting  at “Alabama Confederate Images”  and stared at this Civil War era ambrotype image  that was purported  to be my gg-grandfather  Hilliard Judge Askew (1838-1898).

I was staggered. I had never seen a photo anything like that – surely not via my family. Damn, I thought, he certainly looks like the person I would  expect to see at age 25-30, during the time of the Civil War.

But I could not make that much of a comparison  or evaluation because the only other photo I thought that we had of my Hilliard  was taken when  he was maybe in his fifties, and then he was facing sideways  and had a beard.

I browsed on down in the Facebook posting and was astounded to find that someone had posted our family photo of a Confederate soldier that we had previously identified on-line as my ggg-uncle Jesse Bowden Hancock (1838-1912) , brother-in-law to our Hilliard.

Someone had also posted other family photos taken (improperly) from our Yer-Roots-Tracker website and was claiming that the photo we had identified as being Jesse Hancock was actually Hilliard Askew.   Kind of a shocker that someone would try to do that without contacting our family, but that seems to be the story with the likes of Facebook—  definitely not one of my likes!

But, leaving all that behind, and assuming  probable good intentions on the part of the Facebook contributors,  it suddenly dawned on me that they could very well be right about the identification of the uniformed soldier —  I  stared for hours at  our CSA soldier photo and the newly posted Facebook photo – side by side.  The facial resemblance is really remarkable!  I thought they very well could be the same person.

A review of the history of our photo evaluation/identification process, it turns out, supports the idea that they really are the same person—  I think now that our soldier photo is probably of Hilliard Askew, not Jesse Hancock.

About 2002, my cousin Keith Miller discovered that he had inherited a large cache of very old family  photos of persons from his Askew and Beach lines, who for the most part had lived in and around Gordon and Columbia, AL in Henry (and now Houston) Counties.

Working together  with Ann Wear Jacob, another cousin, the three of us labored almost two years trying our best to identify who was in the old photos and when they were taken. We had very little to go on, because unfortunately no one had ever marked identifications  on  the photos or left notes about their provenance.  Since there were a whole variety of photographic types in the collection, we also sought outside advice from an expert on photo dating.

Perhaps of  greatest interest among the old photos was this picture of a Confederate soldier. Who  could he be?  Who in our family was a known soldier and who would have been the most likely to be associated with other individuals we had felt reasonably confident in identifying from the photo collection?  We had inherited most of the then known Askew family history from my uncle Harry Askew, now passed on, who over forty years had compiled a quite admirable family history accounting– without the benefit of any computers or Internet— strictly courthouse visits and correspondence.

Another source of information came to us from Blanche Hancock Turlington, another cousin who had done  remarkable research on her Hancock family, which married into our Askews: Cow-pens and Plantations: Backtracking a Southern Hancock Family, published 2008. She was the granddaughter of Jesse Bowden Hancock.

We first searched all the files we then possessed for the Askew and Beach families.  We also contacted Blanche because her grandfather Jesse had departed his Georgia home after the Civil War and moved to  Gordon, AL to be near his sister, who in Spring, 1866 had married our Hillard Askew.

Jesse was quite the item.  He is memorialized at a 6th Alabama Infantry web site  Very badly wounded at Antietam (1862), after some recovery, he had  been assigned “special duties” by the Confederate  Army for the remainder of the War.  These involved a lot of morale raising, recruiting type activities.  Even post-War,  Jesse continued his support of the Confederate cause. He was involved in some sort of  major confrontation with occupying Federal troops sometime during Reconstruction, about 1872 and he had to flee Henry Co., AL  avoiding a  Federal warrant for his arrest.  He fled all the way to Arkansas, and Blanche told us that for some years he had even been afraid to have a mailbox  with his name on it in his new location.

So with all of this knowledge, Jesse was a definite candidate to be the unidentified soldier in our photo.  Blanche provided us with the oldest photo she had of  her Jesse (vintage 1875) and even with his beard there was a good resemblance to the mystery soldier.  I recall  also that she had conferenced with a facial  recognition authority who supported her contention that  the person in the soldier photo was Jesse.

We checked Beach family files and found that  a Charles LeBaron Beach (1839-1901) had been a carriage carpenter  with CSA  Fla Light Artillery, 1861-65. Charles moved to Georgia right after the War, and we could not discover any really close relationship that he had ever had with the group of Askew/Beach people we had found in our inherited photo collection.

We checked Uncle Harry Askew’s files – and, yes, there were two  Confederate soldiers there:

The first Askew  tree entry was:

Hilliard Judge Askew (10-9-1811 – 12-9-1889)

+m 1838 Nancy Pauline Simonton (1815-1895)

1st Lt. 11 Regiment, CSA Ala. – presented Palmetto Hat to Jefferson Davis for the ladies of Virginia;  buried Dayton Cem. AL

and the second entry was for a Thomas Williams Edwards Askew (1842-1894)

Thomas William Edwards was a younger brother of our great-great grandfather Hilliard Judge Askew (1838-1898)  and our Hilliard, and his brother appeared in Uncle Harry’s notes under their father Spire Warren Askew’s tree as follows :

Spire Warren Alford  Askew  moved to Henry Co., AL

born ca.1815 ; died ca.1858-9 yellow fever

+m 2-15-1836 Dicy K. Edwards  – dau. of Thomas & Barbary Edwards

2 Hilliard Judge Askew

born 6-7-1838 Henry Co. AL; died 10-5-1898 Henry Co. AL

buried Gordon  Cemetery, Gordon, AL

+m  5-10-1866 Henry Co. AL  Sallie Scaife Hancock,  Atlanta, GA

born 9-8-1840 ; d. 11-23-1916  buried Gordon Cem., Gordon, AL

dau. of William Garrison Hancock (1816-~1845) & Mary Bowden  +m. 1836

3 Thomas Williams Edwards Askew

born   1-18-1842;   d.  11-03-94;  buried FMC, AL ???

+m ??? Lizzie Justice;  m. second wife

fought CSA Gen. Beauregard/Hill’s Corp., wounded Seven Pines

For context now, there were TWO Hillard Judge Askews in our large family-  the eldest was Hilliard Judge Askew (1811-1889), who moved in about 1830  from NE Georgia  (Morgan Co.) to Dayton, Marengo Co., in SW Alabama.  The younger Hilliard  (1838-1898), our gg-grandfather, was second son of Spire Warren Askew, brother of elder Hilliard,  who had relocated from Morgan Co., GA to the Gordon, AL  area  about 1840.   So, the elder Hilliard was the  younger Hiillard’s uncle.

Until fairly recently, we were not that aware of any very close correspondence or interactions between these two parts of the family;  geographically they were separated from each other by about 180 miles.

So, looking back at what we were doing in finding possible candidates to be our mystery Confederate  soldier, this  is the point where things probably began to go really  astray.  Uncle Harry had  noted that there was a soldier in our Askew family named Hillard Judge Askew, but he had erroneously placed the defining Confederate service information under the wrong Hilliard’s name !!

I can only guess at how this happened.  Uncle Harry was a very careful person.  Did he have enough information about Hilliard’s Confederate unit that he may have been fooled by that (Co. D, 11th Alabama was conscripted largely from the Marengo Co., AL area).  Could Harry possibly not have realized that his own g-grandfather was a Confederate soldier?  There is nothing in his tree or notes to indicate that the younger Hilliard (1838-1898) was a soldier.  What is remarkable when we,  as cousins, recently discussed our  childhoods, none of us could remember being told that our own Askew great-great grandfather was a Confederate soldier—one indeed who had fought in many battles and been wounded at Gettysburg .  Other Civil War facts were briefly discussed like stories about Gen. Sherman’s March to the Sea, but nothing about our Hilliard.

I am not certain why, but during our soldier photo identification work we never paid much attention to the data Uncle Harry had compiled about Hilliard’s brother Thomas William Edwards Askew—a soldier, yes, but only a vague reference to his War service.  We still don’t know much about Thomas William, and what we do know  pre- and post-War put him somewhat out of touch with others we found in the photo collection. After his father Spire’s sudden death near Gordon, AL in 1858, Thomas William moved over to Jackson Co., FL  and he resided over there after the War.

Had we had ready access to digitized Confederate  records in 2002-2004, even with the vague military information  in Uncle Harry’s notes we probably could have located Thomas William’s service record, and had we done that, we likely would have discovered his brother Hillary’s service, and then had a completely different idea about who was in our soldier photo.

In late 2011, I happened to have a “catchup” conversation with my cousin Keith Miller, and he mentioned our gg-grandfather’s part in the Civil War.  I said  “no, Keith,  that is not our Hilliard; the soldier  was the older Hilliard.”  I was wrong.  Keith had discovered and accessed digitized Confederate records that had  recently become available.  When I checked those at  Ancestry.com’s  “Alabama Civil War Muster Rolls, 1861-1865,” I was stunned to find two Askews listed in consecutive lines in the roster of Company D, Alabama 11th Infantry. Both had enlisted in  the Confederate service on June 11, 1861—right after the War started.  And most intriguing they had joined up in Demopolis, AL, just south of Marengo Co.,  Their residence was listed as Dayton, AL…  Oh, so of course I knew these were our Marengo relatives.  Hilliard Askew, age 24, single, born Georgia. But, wait, the Hilliard I had thought was the soldier would have been 50 years old and was married.   What’s wrong here?   And then the  next line  Thomas  Askew, age 20, single, born Alabama, residence Dayton, AL.   I didn’t know about any Thomas Askew who was supposed to be in Dayton, AL.  In 1860, the Thomas Askew I knew about was a store clerk in Jackson Co., FL. Our Hilliard was an “overseer” for a plantation near Columbia, Henry Co., AL.

So, boom, it finally registered: my orphaned gg-grandfather Hilliard and his brother Thomas William had traipsed across the whole state of Alabama, taken up residence with the Marengo Askews, and had volunteered with a CSA unit in Demopolis.  Really strange..  Conversely, their kin-to-be, Jesse Hancock,  had left his Georgia home near Atlanta and moved to join up with Capt. John B. Gordon’s 6th Alabama Infantry Regiment in  Old Columbia, AL  Why, pray,  didn’t our Askew brothers join up near their home?

But all the data in the CSA roster data was perfectly accurate.  We discovered, in fact, that our gg-grandfather Hilliard had actually been born in Early Co., GA shortly before our family crossed the Chattahoochee  River and settled near Gordon, AL.  His brother Thomas William, however, was born near Gordon.

To make matters more intriguing, we discovered that the  elder Hilliard Askew, quite prominent in Marengo Co., AL, was pro-Union or at least anti-Confederate and had strenuously objected to his son Samuel being conscripted for Confederate service Hilliard suffered an undeserved indignity during Reconstruction  by being required to seek a Federal pardon for giving his soldier son clothing and food—they called it aiding and abetting the enemy.  Would our Askew brothers have taken the trouble to travel 180 miles to reside with a “Union man” for the purpose of joining the Confederate service? I wonder instead if they could have  moved in with Miles Green Askew (1807-1869), elder Hilliard’s brother, who also lived around Dayton.

After all that staring and comparing of photos, something else “clicked.” I had inherited a small treasure trove of old unidentified photos from  my mother.  Among those were two that really stuck out because they were the largest and best cared for in the group.  For some time, I had wondered  if these could be photos of her g-grandfathers because one of them, based on an earlier identifiable photo in Keith Miller’s collection, was almost certainly  her g-grandfather James L. Wilson ( 1827-1908  ).  Now, I feel certain that I know who  is in the other one.   Compare the three  photos side by side —  the new Civil War era Hilliard photo, the Confederate soldier photo, and my mother’s photo.

Just recently, we went back through all the old family photos that we had marked unidentified and happened on one we had discussed as a possible picture of Hillard Askew, his wife and a baby who was born 1867-68.  In comparing that one  to the other pictures,  we have  concluded that they all match.

We have begun to track the provenance of the newly appeared Civil War era photo of our Hillard Judge Askew. According to the person who posted it to the Facebook page,  he bought it from a Civil War memorabilia collector, Owner #1,  who had purchased it in an antique store in Kentucky. It was marked on the back–  “Hillman J. Askew.”

I don’t have the vaguest notion how an old  photo  of our Hilliard Askew might have made it to Kentucky.  As far as I am aware, our family has no connection whatsoever to Kentucky. In most  of the Confederate records, however, our gg-grandfather appears as H.J. Askew, but in one important file he is identified as Hilliam J. Askew— muddying this just a bit, you could have Hillman J. Askew.

Recently, owner #2  sold the photo to a different collector, Owner #3), who claimed he had seen an earlier  photo with the subject in Confederate uniform (very likely our family photo of the Confederate soldier).  Possibly Owner #3  has posted the photo  at our great-great grandfather’s grave site at Find-A-Grave.

I was fortunate to discover via Keith that there are two astoundingly  detailed accountings of the Civil War activities of the 11th Alabama Infantry Regiment.  I am currently living the day-to-day life of a Confederate soldier from recruitment, marches, encampments, diseases, through all the major battles of Gen. R.E. Lee’s  War campaigns.  Fortunately, our Hilliard was wounded and removed to a hospital the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, July 2, 1863, or it’s fairly likely that I would not be alive to write this.