He lost it in the war

My great great grandfather, James Henderson Hogan served in the Confederate army during the Civil War. I found a photo of him a couple years ago in an old family bible. He was born in 1835 and died in 1918.

It was not a very good photo to begin with and after 100 years had been scratched and faded to make it barely recognizable. One personal feature about him does show up if you enlarge the photo enough. His Florida Civil War pension said he was missing a finger. In fact his right forefinger, the index was amputated during the war.

He was a Sergeant in the famed 2nd Florida Infantry Battalion so with a missing trigger finger he must have been pretty determined to continue with the army until the end of the war.

Grandpa was a Whaler

This is the name of a book about Samuel Chadwick & family of Carteret County North Carolina written in 1961 by Amy Muse. It is a small paperback that I found on EBay a couple years ago.

My niece is about to have a baby boy and asked me about unusual family names as ideas for the new great nephew. I gave her a list of all her direct ancestors going back 12 generations. It was over 45 pages long and only listed their names, dates of birth and death!

She was intrigued at the name Chadwick. Our last known ancestor from the Chadwick line was Ephraim Chadwick, who was the brother of Samuel Chadwick.

They both moved to what is now Carteret County North Carolina in the early 1700s from Falmouth, Massachusetts. In 1725 Samuel Chadwick was issued a license to take whales off the coast of North Carolina. Ephraim was also a whaler and owned a whaling boat.

The business of whaling in the 1700s was a lot different than the Greenpeace videos you see today. Men took off from shore on a small boat after they saw whales off the coast and would row or sail the boat close enough to the whale to hit it with a harpoon.

Since the boat was smaller than the whale and their implements powered only by their muscle the whale won most of the encounters.

The men of Massachusetts came to North Carolina probably on the prospect of a larger whale population and less competition for it. They eventually moved on to other occupations, although many were still on the water.

Several Chadwick families moved to Cortez, Florida around 1910 and fished there for a while. They eventually moved back to North Carolina or moved to other parts of Florida. I came across another Carteret County Chadwick descendant several years ago who had settled in St. Petersburg, Florida and successfully developed waterfront property over the last couple decades.

It made a racket

Nathan Hooker Fulford was the brother of my great grandfather. He moved to Cortez, Florida with his two brothers and two sisters 120 years ago. They were farmers and fishermen in North Carolina and since Cortez was located on
Sarasota Bay fishing was more practical than farming.

Nate was somewhat of an innovator in the fishing business, a trait his grandchildren have continued at A P Bell Fish Company.

Around 1910 he was the first person to use a motor on a fishing boat. Before his motor all the boats were powered by wind or the fishermen pushing it thru the water using a long pole.


The following transcript is from an interview my cousin Doris Green took from Herman Sidney Guthrie on April 18, 1974:

"It was just a little boat, I would say about 25 feet

long. It had a four horse Barker engine in it. It made the awfulest racket you ever heard. It would wake you up. After that, other fishermen got them. My Dad bought one. He sent it to Miami to have a muffler put on to try to cut the racket."

I couldn't find a picture of a Barker outboard. This old Evinrude was on display at the Calvert Maritime Museum on Solomons Island, Maryland when we visited last year.

Where we end up

Samuel Urlich Green, a distant cousin was born November 27, 1868 in Mt. Zion, Georgia. His father, grandfather and brother were physicians. I don't know much about him except that he died young, at age 23, over 2200 miles from home.

I was recently given a family history written by his mother in the late 1890s. She listed names, dates of birth and dates of death for 4 generations of the Green family. The only person with a cause of death was for her son Samuel. She said he died of consumption at Buckman Springs, San Diego, California.

I looked up the name Buckman Springs and found it was a stage coach stop that the city of San Diego used as a sanatorium for folks with tuberculosis. The city was too wet and foggy so they sent the sick out into the nearby dessert and the patients lived in tents next to the stage coach stop. A story in the April 1958 Quarterly of the San Diego Historical Society said there were 10 to 12 tents for patients and some of them had been sent out west after contracting the illness, with the belief they would be better off in the dry hot climate.

I don't know if Samuel Green moved to California for his health or wealth but he died on February 27, 1892. He was buried in Los Angeles, apparently in an unmarked grave in the Rosedale cemetery. Samuel never married or had children but his brother named one of his sons after him several years after he died and that name was carried on for 3 more generations in their family.