JANUARY 2003 MEETING will be on the 26^th (back and forth date changes were due to the conflicts our speaker found in his calendar). We will enjoy hearing what Darren Harper, Librarian at Bryan-Lang Historical Library in Woodbine has to tell us about his work. Please come!

UNION MEDAL of HONOR LOANED to SOUTHERN MUSEUM of CIVIL WAR and LOCOMOTIVE HISTORY: When Sgt. John Morehead Scott was given the mission more than 140 years ago, along with Commander James Andrews and the other spies, known as "Andrews' Raiders", to penetrate 200 miles into Confederate territory, steal a Dixie loco-motive and train, and then destroy bridges and tracks between Chattanooga and Atlanta, the mission failed and Scott was captured. He subsequently was tried as a spy and hanged, along with six other "Raiders".

In 1866 Scott was posthumously awarded the Union Medal of Honor, and his medal has now come South to be shown as a centerpiece of the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History at Kennesaw, Georgia.

All of the happenings have been portrayed in a 1956 Disney movie The Great Locomotive Chase. On April 12,1862, a year into the Civil War, at Marrietta, the Northerners boarded a mixed passenger-freight train bound for Chattanooga. When the Southern train crew later got off at Big Shanty for breakfast the Union soldiers uncoupled all but three empty boxcars and left the station. They cut telegraph wires to prevent other Confederates from knowing what was going on.

Andrews, Scott and six other Raiders were tried, and were executed in Atlanta in June 1862. They were all buried in Chattanooga National Cemetery. Some of the other Raiders were imprisoned but some escaped prison in October 1862. Six others were exchanged as POWs in March 1863. That same month Secretary of War Stanton awarded surviving Raiders the Medal of Honor.

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LOCUST GROVE GEORGIA founded in the late 1700s, was settled by families fleeing the aftermath of the French Revolution. Others who early-on peopled it were landowners escaping slave uprisings in Haiti. Later, Irish immigrants were drawn to Locust Grove.

The prosperous townspeople founded Locust Grove Academy, chartered as a Catholic school in 1821. Many prominent Georgia citizens were educated there, including Confederacy vice president Alexander Stephens. Roman Catholic families built a log sanctuary there more than 200 years ago.

The original church and Locust Grove itself are long-gone now. Only a graveyard remains, in Taliaferro County 50 miles west of Augusta.

In the early 1980s, the Rev. John Fallon and his parishioners organized a cleanup of the old cemetery. Using $5,000 from the Atlanta Archdiocese they cleaned away the weeds and brush, restored the gravestones and made it respectable again. Two years ago the Georgia General Assembly voted to appropriate $30,000 to the DNR Historical Preservation Division to be awarded as a grant to the archdiocese to restore the cemetery. Now, DNR has suspended giving grants to any Georgia churches for historical preservation projects, fearing that it could violate the separation of church and state [Ho, hum! How about the separation of tombstone and burial site?].

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BETH GAY HAS READ A BOOK, actually, she reads a lot of books, but this one on DNA was especially exciting for genealogy, The Seven Daughters of Eve by Dr. Bryan Sykes a professor of Genetics at the Institute of Mol-ecular Medicine at Oxford University.

Beth had read about Dr. Sykes' work with the Ice Man, the Cheddar Man, and the Romanoff family of Russia's historic days of royal rulers [seems like we have read news accounts of the Ice and Cheddar Men awhile back]. She learned about the special nature of our mitochondrial DNA from The Seven Daughters of Eve.

Our mitochondrial DNA is special because it is passed on to the next generation only through the egg [and not the ones we have for breakfast, either]. This DNA is inherited only through your mother who inherited it from her mother who inherited it from her mother - and on and on down through the dim corridors of time.

Dr. Sykes writes that mitochondrial DNA produces a direct link to our maternal ancestors. We all inherit other genes from many other ancestors, but only mitochondrial DNA traces a direct line from our mother. Beth says "About the only sure thing in genealogy is that none of us is missing even one of our millions of ancestors".

"I read of a college professor who asked his class, 'Who in this class had ancestors in the eighth century?'

Not one student raised his hand.

We may not know about them, but you can know for sure that you had ancestors in the eighth century and the seventh and the sixth and right back down through all the years that man has been on earth."

"How could Dr. Sykes find descendants of the Ice Man? How could he find living people directly descended from Cheddar Man?

In his book, he tells about his research into a remarkable gene that passes undiluted from generation to generation through the maternal line. After plotting thousands of DNA sequences from all over the world, Dr. Sykes found that they clustered around a handful of distinct groups. Among Europeans and North American Caucasians, there are, in fact, only seven.

The conclusion was absolutely staggering. Almost all people of native European descent, wherever they may now live, can trace their ancestry back to one of seven women, hence The Seven Daughters of Eve. He named them Ursula, Xenia, Helena, Velda, Tara, Katrine and Jasmine."

Beth observes, "With a painless swipe of a little brush on the inner part of my own cheek, I have learned that I come from Helena, who saw the last of the Ice Age and who lived 20,000 years ago. Any cousins who are reading this and who share my mother's family, you are Helena too."

Dr. Sykes tells in his book of how he took a DNA sample from a Caribbean woman whose family had been sold into slavery centuries before and whose DNA was traced back to Kenya. He details the story of the Ice Man, Cheddar Man and the Romanoffs too. Along the way you'll learn about the DNA of hamsters [Beth, he's gone too far now! You know I ain't kin to no hamster!].

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JACKIE in OCALA TELLS BETH: "….no matter how hard you try, you cannot baptize a cat." [that doesn't sound like something our Baptist friends would admit, and we don't know Jackie!]

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JACOB JESSUP'S 1865 LETTER: (written six days after General Lee had surrendered at Appomattox - communications were so poor that Jacob's unit had not heard that the war was over). Jacob was the oldest son of Hiram and Sallie J. Jessup, born circa 1838, and he returned home at the close of the war, only to die in 1869 at the old home place, his death possibly due to the privations he had to endure while serving in the Confederate Army. He writes:

Beaufort County, N.C.
April the 15, 1865

Dear Father and Mother:

I again take up my pen to write you a few lines to let you know that I am still in the land of the living and tolerably well at this time and surely hoping when these few lines come to hand they may find you all enjoying the same blessings of health.

Father, I have no good news to write you at this time. We have hard times here plenty. We have been marching ever since we left Kinston. We left Kinston on the 25th of March, and the worst of it is we don't get nothing to eat hardly. We don't get but 3 or 4 little crackers and one fourth pound of meat a day, and some days we don't get nothing only what we can buy. It is getting so we can't buy anything, for it is not here to buy.

We are living 4 miles below Washington [known as 'Little Washington' in North Carolina] on Tar River. Our men attacked Washington, County seat of Beaufort, two weeks ago, and they have been fighting with cannon ever since. There hasn't been anybody killed, only artillerymen. I have heard the whiz of the bomb shells and saw them burst, but have escaped so far. But I don't know how soon I may be beat down.

I have stood picket in plain view of the Yankee pickets. There are three brigades of our men around Washington. They are trying to starve the Yankees out. I don't know whether they will succeed or not.

I wrote a letter yesterday and started it home. I don't know whether it will get home or not. It is a bad chance about sending letters or getting any, for we have got off so far from any post office. It is 25 or 30 miles from any post office. We have to send letters by men who are passing.

I got a letter from Lee since I left Kinston. I was glad to hear you were all well. Lee wrote me in his letter that Mother sent me some things by Mr.Frawlin, but I never got them . When you write me again I want you to write me what you sent by Frawlin.

I don't think this war will last much longer. I think starvation will bring it to a close. I saw in a paper the other day where an officer who is at Fredricksburg had wrote a piece, and he says they don't get but one pound of flour a day and one-half pound of meat for three days and one spoon full of salt a week. Dried fruit was worth 32 dollars per bushel, potatoes 20 dollars per bushel at Fredricksburg.

Write soon. Direct your letters to Kinston, N.C., Co.E, 53rd Regiment. So I will bring my letter to a close by saying I remain your affectionate son until death.

Jacob Jessup

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"As the American Revolution wound down in the period between the cessation of hostilities and the signing of the peace treaty, the state of North Carolina faced the problem of dealing with citizens who had supported the British. In North Carolina…. they considered a bill which named individuals required to stand trial for treason. In the end the bill was not enacted into law but was referred to the next assembly session. By the time the session convened in the spring of 1783, a peace treaty between the United States and Britain was near.

North Carolina was in a different mood and the 1783 legislature passed "An Act of Pardon and Oblivion" which began as follows:

Whereas, it is the policy of all wise states on the termination of civil wars, to grant an act of pardon and oblivion for past offenses, and as divers of the citizens of this state, and others the inhabitants thereof, in the course of the late unhappy war, have become liable to great pains and penalties for offenses committed against the peace and government of the state, and the general assembly out of an earnest desire to observe the articles of peace, and on all occasions disposed to forgive offences rather than punish where the necessity for exemplary punishment has ceased.

----From an article in the NCGS Journal for November 2002.