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.
It’s great to be asked.
“Austintown” cover.
It was Friday that I discovered that I was called out in the “Acknowledgements” of a 2007 history of Austintown, Ohio, written by Joyce Pogany. I recall Ms. Pogany’s research assistant emailing me, asking for references to our Templeton ancestors being among the first settlers of the valley in eastern Ohio, back before 1798 or whenever I asserted in my bio of William Templeton. I think I might have even talked to her on the phone, but my memory is pretty fuzzy going back six- or seven years. I provided the bibliographic references and links on the Internet she could reach immediately, and followed up with downloaded text files of the more-or-less oral history from a reunion weekend of folks that knew the early settlers. Come to find out, the info I provided comprise the first paragraph of Ms. Pogany’s book, near as I can tell.
The origins, y’know.
It’s nice to be asked about what I’ve learned.
Nineteenth century photography didn’t always catch the “essence” of a person.
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.
We’re told that the stern, stiff-necked gentleman above had a delightful sense of humor. You wouldn’t know it by looking at him in this picture, but as a younger man he was an unabashed adventurer and not afraid to live outside the law, to boot. He must have been a fascinating conversationalist since he was an educated university man back when few from the frontier of Central Pennsylvania even finished the local, crude pastor’s schools; and we know that he was a compelling public speaker.
He was the Reverend John Lenox Monteith, son of Daniel Monteith and nephew to our Allie Templeton (nee Monteith).
John was recruited right out of Princeton Theological Seminary (now Princeton University) by Governor Lewis Cass and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to bring Protestantism to the wild & wooly (and largely Catholic) burg of Detroit. That was in the summer of 1816. Monteith rode a horse out from New Jersey, making the trip through the forested expanse of the western frontier in only fifteen days!
Within a year of his arrival the Reverend joined with his Catholic counterpart in Detroit, Father Gabriel Richard, to found an institute of higher learning that grew to become the University of Michigan with Monteith as its first President. He also ran the local lending library.
Like his kin among the Ohio Templetons, he was staunchly anti-slavery. His abolitionist feeling was deep and evidently more urgent, however, and sommers ‘round the mid- to late 1830s (our best guess) he made a trip to Utica, New York, where he mixed with other Abolitionists, and met the important activist Theodore Weld. Monteith returned home to become an early affiliate of “Weld’s Seventy” — a group of committed and active public speakers against the scourge of slavery, and as in the Reverend’s case, secret agents of the Underground Railroad.
Upon his return to the Great Lakes, Monteith moved to Ohio and took a position in Elyria, near enough to the Lake so’s a tunnel from his home to a mooring on the lake could be the last leg on the Oberlin trace of the Underground Railroad.
So don’t let the stern, judgmental mien in the picture above fool ya. The guy was a wild man, in his own Presbyterian minister kinda way.
