John Nelson: Farmer, Soldier, Farmer

John Nelson (1825-1907), a distant ancestor of my husband, was among the brave "Iron Men" of the Indiana 44th Regiment fighting at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862, during the US Civil War. He was a son of John Martin Nelson and Susannah McKibbin. Born in Ohio, as a young man he moved to Indiana with his farming family. 

In the fall of 1861, with the Civil War underway, Nelson and many other men from northeast Indiana enlisted with the 44th Indiana. Their letters home helped illuminate the war's toll on these men.

Nelson himself, part of Company H, was badly wounded at Shiloh, a bloody battle won by the Union. Still, he returned to fight as soon as he was able. The 44th Indiana Infantry fought so courageously, in fact, that the state of Indiana later erected a historical marker at Shiloh, Tennessee, in their honor.  

Throughout the war, the 44th fought on and on, including at the Battle of Chickamauga, where Nelson was again wounded, according to his Find a Grave memorial page. Company H of the 44th was photographed as shown at top and the regiment was well documented, as you can see on the Wikipedia Commons page here.

Finally mustered out at war's end, Nelson returned home to farm. He filed for an invalid's pension soon after the war. When he died in September of 1907, he was buried with a simple Civil War headstone that noted his rank as private. Remembering John Nelson: farmer, soldier, farmer.

Sepia Saturday and Saturday Night Genea-Fun

James Edgar Wood in his 1917 Ford, Summer of 1917

This week's Sepia Saturday ties in well with my response to Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge! So I combined the two.

Sepia Saturday: Posing with the Car

Above, a photo taken of my husband's grandfather, James Edgar Wood (1871-1939) by hubby's father, Edgar James Wood, (1903-1986). Ed was only 14 when he took this photo of his father during a road trip from their home in Cleveland, OH to downtown Chicago, visiting Wood family members along the way. Ed had gotten a camera for his birthday and began a lifelong hobby of chronicling family activities.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Top 20 Surnames in Family Tree

Using RootsMagic7, and following Randy's instructions, I went to Reports, then Lists, scrolled down to "Surname Statistics List," and selected "Frequency of Surnames" from the list.

With 3,128 people in my husband's Wood family tree, I could have printed 17 pages for the "Frequency of Surnames" report. Instead, I printed only the first two pages. After that, the frequency of surnames dropped off sharply.

And the winner is . . . WOOD, which appears a total of 204 times (125 males, 78 females). The oldest date of a Wood ancestor record is 1551, the most recent date is 2019.

The top 20 are: Wood, Larimer, McClure, Work, Steiner, Slatter, McKibbin, Hilborn, Denning, Smith, Cushman, Brown, Taber, Nelson, Johnson, Bradford, Short, Caldwell, Rinehart, and Miller. 

By the time I got to Miller, there were only 17 appearances in the Wood family tree (11 males, 6 females), with the oldest date of 1803 and the most recent date of 2006. A Miller married a Work (the granddaughter of a Work-Larimer marriage) and that's how the Miller surname connects to my husband's Wood family tree.