A Bit More on the 24th Michigan

Turns out I may have been a bit too flip in my last post about Garrett Garretson and his 24th Michigan Regiment Volunteer Infantry experience. It was definitely no camping trip!

It turns out that the regiment fought at least ten major Civil War battles before even getting to Gettysburg on 01 July 1863. Four hundred ninety-six of them arrived that morning. "On the morning of July 2-3, 1863, 99 answered roll call." Those left went on to campaigns in The Wilderness, Spotsylvania and other places before being reassigned to garrison and guard duty in Springfield, IL in February of 1865. The 24th was also the regiment selected to escort Lincoln's body when it arrived for the funeral.

This gives me a whole new line of events to look at while I research by great-great grandfather. And to think his daughter was always talking to my own dad just about her family's connection to the American Revolution. Seems like the Civil War connection will prove even more striking, and perhaps more accessible for some in-depth research.

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Goin' Camping with Great-Great Grandpa...

Having found GGG Garretson’s Civil War record a few weeks ago, yesterday I got another great discovery. There is a 24th Michigan Volunteer Infantry reenactor group alive and well and kicking off its 150th Civil War anniversary celebrations with an encampment in Hastings in mid-July. So here I am, retired and getting excited about going camping with great-great grand dad this summer!   Who woulda thought...


I’ve been to a few of these before—Civil War and even Revolutionary War camps. But this is the first time that I have a personal interest in questioning the participants, getting their views on the historic events. Who knows, perhaps one of them actually portrays my GGG, though since he was merely an enlisted man, I’d be surprised by that. But here’s the real treasure—and reason for going. They have a picture of 50+ GAR regimental vets on their web site. I’m anxious to see if there is a record of exactly who is pictured.

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What Did You Do in the War Great-Great Grandpa?

After being stuck for a time, I recently located my second great grandfather’s military history records. It was a shocking discovery for this man about whom I know so very little. Suddenly he went from being ordinary shoemaker up near Detroit to having been part of some of the biggest battles of the American Civil War!

Garret Garretson of Brownstown, Wayne, Michigan was part of the 24th Michigan Infantry, organized 15 Aug 1862. They fought with joined the Army of the Potomac at Fredricksburg, Gettysburg (Culps Hill, etching right), Chancellorville, Petersburg... Disease was almost as big a killer among the 2104 men of the 24th Michigan (109) as those killed in battle/died of their wounds (267). In the course of the war, 28 members of the regiment found themselves in Confederate prisons.

The history of the regiment was written by Henry A. Morrow, Col. Twenty-fourth Michigan Volunteers (himself among those who spent time in a Confederate Prison) and Capt. J.D. Wood, Assistant Adjutant-Gen.

I bring this up because I’ve been working on creating richer biographical sketches for my ancestors—something that takes them beyond just being a series of dates and puts them in a temporal and social context that helps me better grasp who they were and how who I am may related to things learned and passed on from some of them.

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Where and Why Did Great Grandpa Roam?

Great grandpa Edgar N. Rowe was born in New York in 1854, though some census records erroneously list him born in Wisconsin in 1855. By age three, his parents William Thomas and Margaret Rockafellow Rowe had moved to Wisconsin, where his ten younger brothers and sisters were all born.


 In his mid-20s, Edgar returned to his paternal family roots in Rensselaer County New York. His grandmother Susanna Link Rowe and at least one uncle had farms in and around Schodack Center according to this 1876 map (courtesy of K. Grimm). Yet, Edgar wasn’t living with them when the 1880 Census taker came calling. Instead, he boarded with the family of Anna Snook, her daughter, and her son John and his wife and daughter. (There were several Snook families with New York roots in and around Kenosha County Wisconsin during those years, though I have yet to determine which, if any, might have been related to Anna.)

Questions remain:  Why didn’t Edgar live with his Rowe relatives when he went back? Did he farm his family’s land or that of others? He must have had some sense of attachment to the family and the land because he and his wife returned to Schodack Landing at least once. That’s where their twin sons Lloyd and Floyd were born August 13, 1892.

For the 20 years between the 1880 and 1900 Censuses, Edgar seems to have dropped out of sight. Where was he? Who were the people around him? Was he the adventurous sort? Did he stay in one place?

When they took the Census in the summer of 1900, Edgar was back in Lake Geneva, Walworth, Wisconsin. In November of that year, he made a trip to Detroit, Wayne, Michigan where he married Jennie M. Garretson (see previous post). He was 46 years old; Jennie was 43. (The story goes, according to their granddaughter Janet, they met through a newspaper column. If that’s true, I’m descended from “correspondence brides” on both sides of my family! More on that when I get to the Italians.) From there, it was back to Wisconsin and within 10 years to Rockford, Winnebago, Illinois where he died on July 10, 1946.

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What Did Great Grandma Jennie Do?

When great grandma Jennie lived with the JB Crouse family In Hartland, Livingston, Michigan in 1880, she listed her occupation as “milliner.” Now, everyone knows that’s a hat maker, right? Not so fast. Up through the 19th Century, a milliner might, indeed, make hats, but she—and it was almost always she—might also be a seamstress, a designer, an entrepreneur. (Think Coco Channel, for one famous example!). In fact, the millinery was the forerunner to the modern day department store back before paper patterns, standard sizes and ready-to-wear.


In the milliner’s shop, any woman (thought most patrons were middle and upper class) could find anything from everyday hats to fancy gowns, from farmer shirts to aprons, from watches to table settings. The milliner sold just about anything related to women’s fashion, accessories and the home. There weren’t many occupations open to respectable women in the late 1800s. Being a milliner could be a ticket to independence. Small wonder only house maids were more plentiful among working women of the time. Most milliners were under 25. They spent up to seven years as an apprentice learning the trade, and there was a definite pecking order among the small group of employees in any millinery. (Most shops employed two or three people.)

By the time great grandma Jennie called herself a milliner in the 1880 Census, she was about 23 years old. Her father, Garret Garretson, a shoemaker by trade, had died about three years earlier. Her widowed mother Minerva still lived in Brownstown, Wayne, Michigan, where the Garretson family had been among the town’s leading citizens. Uncles, aunts and cousins—they all still lived there as well, but Jennie had left on her own and moved halfway across the next county.

Jennie may have learned the rudiments of the millinery craft in the Garretson family shoe shop. Most girls of that era were taught how to sew routinely at home in the 1860s and 1870s, so she may have learned there. Or she may have served an apprenticeship in someone else’s shop before striking out on her own. (Perhaps that was her role in Hartford?) I’m still checking on all that. By 1880 Jennie was living a county away from the rest of her family. She was boarding with a family and paying rent.

It was a heady era In the United States. People were beginning to recover from the depression of 1877. The transcontinental railroad was done. Edison had bought the patent for the electric light bulb, and Bell invented the telephone. Out west, the US Cavalry was still hunting for Geronimo…And in Hartland, Livingston, Michigan, my great grandmother had struck out on her own, independent in terms that most modern American women understand, making her own way in the world…

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The Genealogy of Ideas

Just back from Dearborn, MI and a visit to “The Henry Ford.” Greenfield Village has long been on my places-to-visit radar, so I wasn’t prepared for the reaction I had to the place. Rather than getting a good sense of history, I really got a better idea of the acquisitive side of Henry Ford’s own nature.

Here we have important historical buildings—most ripped out of the places that gave rise to them and the marvelous ideas they represent. There are firsts (oldest) and lasts of their kinds… Edison’s home and lab, the Wright brothers’ house sit in the midst of streets nearly empty the day I was there, amid manicured lawns where almost no scrap is thoughtlessly tossed aside.

Ford obviously had an incredible drive to collect all these buildings and put them on display. Yes, many of the inventions represented fit together at the dawn of the new American age. The collection is marvelously preserved and kept up, has been open to the public for 80 years. But, there’s something about wrenching ideas, people and places from the environments that actually nourished them that makes them seem smaller than they really are. I think it’s the chaos of a person’s times, place and circumstances that lead to great ideas and innovations—the genealogy of the idea or innovation put in perspective. That’s what was missing for me.

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Everybody's a Revisionist!

My past and present have finally caught up to each other. I think I knew they'd been battling all along, but it took finding Hendrick Fosmire, my American Revolution era ancestor, to convince me. And I shouldn’t have been shocked. After all, I’ve been teaching classes on creating legacies and on memory for years. In both, I use examples of how each of us re-tells our own past differently at different times to better suit our presents. What do you emphasize? What do you leave out?

As a life-long student of history, I now realize that things are no different. Revisionism is the name of the game! In my grad school days, the rage was talking about the history of the overlooked—slaves, working people, women, immigrants who never attained the level of “great men in American history.” Today, as I go back and read about old Hendrick’s era in New York and about the early colonies and birth of our nation, I’m struck again by how the flavor of the history has changes in each telling. The tradition of revisionism is alive and well! (As it probably should be.) We see the past and interpret it in light of what we know—perhaps what we need to know--about the here and now.

So, when it comes to doing history or even genealogy, which do we trust? Is it the accounts closest to events written by those involved or is it those researched and footnoted decades, even centuries, later by researchers who go over the old records? I think the answer is a bit of both.

The former can give us a glimpse into the thinking of those involved in events and their roles in them. It’s based on what each perceived at the moment, usually from his or her limited information. But it’s not necessarily based on the full breadth of facts and hindsight often available to the modern researcher—the larger world view, if you will. And when each of us looks at those facts, we look at them with our sensibilities of the present, of our lives and concerns and issues. What gets emphasized and how is often colored by our own concerns and issues. For example, in the early 1970s, I was researching Deborah Franklin, Benjamin’s wife, left alone to fend for herself and her family for days on end. A professor at the time helped shape the view of her as somehow deprived, abandoned by a bon vivant husband out shaping the world. Having now read many letters and papers of colonial women and the men in their lives, I realize just how limited that view was.

In the early 1970s, the modern women’s movement was just getting started. Women were struggling to find “meaningful,” independent roles in the family and in the larger community. In a sense, we were just reclaiming the sorts of roles and influence women in earlier times exercised just by virtue of necessity.

I don’t think either view is completely right or wrong. I do think we need to keep both in mind as we make judgments, as we read history and even as we do genealogical research. Be careful how much of our own issues and times we being to the interpretation.

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