It was neat finding out that my great grandfather, Roy Brunson, had a sister and then being able to track down some of her descendants. But also at some point in the last few years, someone had gone into Family Search and added some ancestors for Roy’s parents and beyond. Roy’s father was known only as J. A. Brunson everywhere I found him. I found a Josiah A. Brunson in Mississippi, so I added that name, but I wasn’t confident about it. With the recent updates J. A. now had parents, Joseph Brunson and Elizabeth J. Young. For a while Elizabeth was only listed as Elizabeth Brunson, because her maiden name wasn’t known. Eric pointed out that Elizabeth Young’s brother was Hiram Casey Young, a confederate colonel and 4-term United States Congressman after the war, representing Memphis, Tennessee. Today a Congressman’s district has 710,000 people on average. Back then the number was 123,000, which is less than the number of people in one of Georgia’s 56 state senate districts. He represented Tennessee’s 10th Congressional District, but today Tennesssee only has 9 districts. Even though Casey wasn’t a direct ancestor, he would be my 3rd great granduncle. But I warned Eric that the Brunson-Young connection couldn’t be trusted 100% since it was entered fairly recently and I don’t know what supporting evidence was offered. In fact, Family Search showed that Casey had one sister named Elizabeth and another named Eliza, both with different birth years, husbands and children, which seemed a little unlikely, especially since Young is a pretty common last name and Elizabeth such a common first name. So anybody could attach an Elizabeth Young to this prominent family of a congressman. Then an interesting piece of evidence came up from the website, findagrave.com which tries to index and photograph all the tombstones in the country. Here is findagrave’s picture of Congressman Hiram Casey Young’s tombstone from Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis, which is amazingly simple, without his full name, the fact that he was in Congress, or even birth and death year, just “Casey Young” and Confederate flags:
I suppose maybe the gravestone was given to him by a Daughters of the Confederacy group or something like that and may have even been made before he died. Anyway, also at Family Search, someone included a link to Elizabeth Young’s gravestone, which turns out to also be in Elmwood in Memphis:
A note at findagrave said that her name was carved on the back of the headstone of her brother, Hiram Casey Young. The stone doesn’t say they are brother and sister, but it seems likely and there are some sources to back it up. Casey Young never married or had any children, so it is nice to think he and his sister stayed friends their whole lives, but I’m not sure when Elizabeth actually died (found out later, see comments). Her husband, Joseph Brunson, had died before the 1860 census. The 1870 census shows her in Marshall County, Mississippi living with some of her children and also apparently her grandchild, Estelle Brunson, who was already in the same census at her parents’ house, also in Marshall County.
Elizabeth had married Joseph Brunson, who was born in 1812 and died in 1855. Thanks to the recent updates, Joseph’s father was now also listed at Family Search as Asahel Brunson, who quite questionably lived from 1760 to 1860, so you can’t trust everything people enter at Family Search. The 1850 census was the first one to list everyone in a household by name. Before that, only the head of household was named and then there were tallies of people by age, sex, and race. The early censuses were okay for finding heads of household, but told you little else (it wasn’t until 1880 that a question was included about what the relationship of each member of the household was to the head of household (wife, daughter, brother, etc.). So it is very difficult researching people before 1850. Every now and then you can get lucky by Googling the name of a relative, especially if you have a state or county to go with it. I Googled “Asahel Brunson” and came up with a court case from 1838 called Brunson v. Brunson regarding the estate of Dr. Asahel Brunson, who died without a will in 1827, leaving his widow and three sons, plus the estate of a fourth son who died earlier. It had become case law in Tennessee, so it was all typed up and went into pretty good detail about Dr. Brunson’s family with names, spouses, and a surprising number of deaths (one son was already dead, one died a year after his father, and a third died before the estate was settled, plus his widow died before things were wrapped up too). This was great information, extremely reliable given that it was written in a legal document at a time when most of these people were alive. It covered three generations of Brunsons and, based on the court case only, I was able to sketch out a pretty decent family tree:
The son that died previous to his father was also named Dr. Asahel Brunson. Though Family Search had him incorrectly listed as having lived 1760-1860, he was shown on Ancestry as having died in 1815 in New Orleans. Eric pointed out that that could be related to the War of 1812 and the Battle of New Orleans. Looking up further I found a cemetery record from Saint Louis Cemetery in New Orleans (where one of Captain Alexander Grant’s children and two of wife Olympe Grasse’s brothers are also buried) for Asahel Brunson, with a welcome amount of writing:
In memory of
Doctor Asahel Brunson
a native of Halifax County, North Carolina
moved with his father to Tennessee in the Spring of 1805
Departed this life in the Army at New Orleans
February 15, 1815
Aged 26 years, 4 months, 9 days
This puts his birthday at October 6, 1788, says he was in the Army at the time (Tennessee is named the Volunteer State because of the large number of volunteers they sent to the War of 1812), and gives some great family history about when they moved from Halifax County, North Carolina to Tennessee. Eric says “this shows a nice headstone is really worth the money.” For whatever reason, findagrave did not have the record of any Brunsons in this cemetery. However, I found a blog post with a picture of the gravestone:
His date of death is over a month after the battle took place on January 8, so I am not sure how he died. Probably not due directly to battle. As a doctor he was probably exposed to a lot of disease, and army encampments were rife with all kinds of bad diseases, especially in a coastal area like New Orleans.
Brunson v. Brunson mentions he left behind a wife and three children: Joseph, Penelope, and Asahel. I can’t be 100% sure, but it certainly seems like Joseph Brunson is the same person who would marry Elizabeth Young in Marshall County, Mississippi in 1845, tying this block of Brunsons into my line. Further, the 1850 census shows Joseph and Elizabeth with a 3 year old son, Ashbell. Then in the 1860 census, Joseph has died already, but Elizabeth is listed with her children, including a 13 year old Josep Bronson, making me think that is the same son as Ashbell in 1850. Therefore Roy’s father J. A. Brunson is probably Joseph Ashbel Brunson.
There are some other neat stories associated with all of this. The widow of Dr. Asahel Brunson, Jr., who died in New Orleans, remarried in 1818, but she died shortly after giving birth to the second child of that marriage in 1820. Asahel’s children, now orphans, were raised by her brothers, which we know from a recorded legal arrangement that gave them an allowance for doing so.
Asahel Jr.’s brother, Ashbel, died a year after his father, in 1828. His widow married Cave Johnson, a local lawyer, in 1838. Cave Johnson served 7 terms as a US Congressman, was a campaign manager for James Polk’s winning presidential campaign, and served as Postmaster General of the United States when the post office switched from charging the recipient for delivered mail to using postage stamps paid for by the sender.
The older Dr. Asahel Brunson, who died in 1827, supposedly immigrated from Scotland (or maybe just went to school there) and was a surgeon in the Revolutionary War, according to family history. He married Penelope Atherton in North Carolina. Her father (my 6 x great grandfather), Jeptha Atherton, was a colonel in the Continental Army and who later imported a horse from England named Janus, who Wikipedia says was the first quarter horse.
The Brunsons went from being what I thought were just poor farmers in Mississippi to being a very interesting branch of the family with their own amazing history.
Fabulous research men! This is fun to read and try to imagine the world as it was. It is nice to think Casey and his sister Elizabeth stayed friends their whole lives. I certainly hope the same will be true for me and my brothers! Thanks for all the information.
I was doing some more research on people who are buried in Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis (coincidentally, a lot of our family is buried in a different Elmwood Cemetery in Birmingham) and I was finding death records that said they were buried at Elmwood, but they weren’t coming up in findagrave.com. I wondered if maybe Elmwood had an online database like Augusta has. Sure enough. It gives you very, very little information, but it always gives you the name, the date of the burial, and where in the cemetery they were buried. This is nice because family members are often buried in the same section or the same plot and their database also gives you everyone else in the plot. I was happy to see that great grandfather Roy Brunson was buried in the same plot as his grandmother (who he probably knew, since he was born in 1876) and his granduncle, Casey Young. Also, their record for Mrs. E. J. Brunson indicates she was buried on August 17, 1896. Usually that means the person died a day or two before that date and I had no idea when she died. I assumed, because her name was on the other side of the grave from her brother, that she died after he did, but she actually died 3 years before.
According to the Elmwood database, some people named Barnard are also buried in this plot. Elizabeth and Casey Young’s sister, Eliza, married Charles Barnard and then died shortly after giving birth to a son, Robert Edgar Barnard, in 1861, who became a judge in Memphis and certainly would have known his uncle Casey. Judge Robert Barnard had a son, Earl Robert Barnard, who is buried in the same plot as our relatives as well as his wife Lena. So Earl was a second cousin to Roy Brunson.