Pin-balling around the genealogy searches.
This screen in front of me can quickly become the flickering lights and ringing bells of an arcade game — a stream-of-consciousness carom from thought to link to link to thought, then trailing down to a flipper with a whip back up into another zig-zag through the bumpers of data points scattered around the Internet. It was a photo of a headstone in a discussion thread notification that got me started. The name on the marker, “Rhoda Templeton Wright,” didn’t pan out to have any connection to my family though all three names appear in my database. But the search turned up a reference to Hiram C. Templeton, who it turns out has a Civil War record to be found.
This surprised me a little bit, since I had thought most of the Ohio Templeton men were either too old or too young to have seen service in that conflict. That is, with the notable exception of Robert H Templeton, who fought with the 26th Regiment, Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry at Chancellorsville and at Gettysburg, only to lose his life after Chattanooga as Sherman advanced on Atlanta.
Turns out, even Michael Templeton has a “Draft Registration” or some-such record, scanned and in an Ancestry.com database.
Bouncing around the search engines, there appears to be another couple of Ohio Templetons, more Wisconsiners and perhaps a trail from Ohio to Michigan. I may have even found a whiff of a trail to my long-suspected Indiana Templeton kin. But, since I’m not an Ancestry subscriber anymore, it’s looking like a couple of trips to the LDS Genealogy Library is in order.
This just might be the opening of that pandora’s box of the Civil War I’ve been putting off all this time.
