Scrutinizing My Naughty List

#52ancestors Week 50- Dec 10-16
 Prompt: Naughty

 Scrutinizing My Naughty List 

By Myra Vanderpool Gormley © 2018

 Picking a “naughty” ancestor to write about this week was a monumental challenge. Which one? 

While it is fun for us genealogists to joke about our horse thieves, outlaws, and less-than-sterling ancestors, when you have a tree full of them, it is a bit embarrassing to have so many from which to choose. How on earth did I come to have so many “colorful” progenitors? Is that a special gene? If so, where is it located in the DNA? 

I started to write about my 3great-grandmother, Margaret (George) Awtrey, who in April of 1871 in Haralson County, Georgia filed a Civil War Damage Claim before the Southern Claims Commission[1] claiming that she had been loyal to the Union during the Civil War and had had $279 worth of property taken by or furnished to the Union Army during the rebellion. Her claim included a horse, seven hogs and some potatoes. 

But, I don’t know whether Margaret was actually a pro-Unionist or not. Perhaps she was naughty and lied. Perhaps she was telling the truth or filed because she was in dire circumstances after losing her husband and their home. One can understand a lie in such a situation, but a lie is still a lie. The U.S. government denied her claim. While she said she had been loyal to the U.S., her husband had been a Confederate Army spy, and the witnesses for her claim were her sons and sons-in-law — all former Confederate soldiers and probably not the best witnesses to call upon. 

However, I changed my mind about which ancestor to write about when I recalled that once upon a time I stumbled upon some others with shady pasts while I was reading dull dry deeds of Etowah County, Alabama. Therein, I had found a record that Randall Hensley was indebted to a fellow for $500 for signing an Internal Revenue Bond . . . for the personal appearance of his son, Francis Marion Hensley. 

Oh, no! The latter is my great-grandpa. His father, Randall Hensley, mortgaged his 120-acre farm to pay for the bond and Francis Marion Hensley was charged with violation of the Internal Revenue Law of the U.S. He had been arrested on the Coosa River and charged with “engaging in and carrying on a business of a distiller of Spirituous liquors without having paid the special tax or given bond as by law required.” [2]

Gulp! Dodging taxes is usually unwise, and moonshining, even with its interesting historical past in America, had been discouraged during the Civil War when several Southern states passed laws prohibiting the use of grains for anything but food. After the war a federal tax on home distilleries became law and during the 1870s, this law began to be enforced and in early 1875 they nabbed my great-grandpa. 

By Original: Pfly, using a base map template made with US Federal public domain GIS data;Version 3: John Lambert - This is a modification of File:MobileAlabamaCoosa2.png, which is in Wikimedia under GFDL license., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2065758

Now, a moonshiner in the hills of northeastern Alabama is not how I had pictured my ancestor, so I was somewhat relieved when I read the court case wherein Francis Marion Hensley claimed that he just happened to be tending the still when the Revenuers came by — he was “watching it for another fellow.” 

Well, of course, I wanted to believe him. And did, briefly until I read the name of the fellow for whom he was tending the still — who was, good grief — his father-in-law!

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 1 "Barred and Disallowed Case Files of the Southern Claims Commission, 1871-1880" (NARA M1407) records. Southern Loyalists (those who were Union sympathizers) made 22,298 claims for property losses totaling $60,258,150.44. However, only 7,092 claims (32%) were approved for settlements totaling $4,636,920.69. Each claimant sought to prove their loyalty and loss through the testimony of others. The paper trail created by the claimants and the people who came forward to testify, for or against a claimant, provide a wealth of information about individuals living in the South during the Civil War.

2 Jason Sumich, "It's All Legal Until You Get Caught: Moonshining in the Southern Appalachians," article, Appalachian State University, Anthro.appstate.edu (https://anthro.appstate.edu/research/field-schools/ethnographic-and-linguistic-field-schools/summer-2007-Alleghany-county : online 9 December 2018); Department of Anthropology-ASU-Boone, NC.