As I think back over my growing years I realize how little I learned from my parents concerning my ancestors. It was not until after they were gone that my interest was aroused in my roots. My parents did not reminisce much about the past, but I did know from them that my mother's father, William Warder Henderson, had served in the army during the Civil War. I had always taken it for granted that he was with the Union forces, so was surprised when I learned that he fought on the side of the south.

When William Warder Henderson was drafted by the Confederacy he was the father of five children, the youngest, Amanda, only fifteen days old, and the oldest not quite seven. The first child only lived eight days, but there were five living children.

Our ancestor, Lillie, was not yet born.

One sentence recorded from the Hardesty history was not strictly true. "After this engagement he was stricken with fever and taken home, and before his recovery the war ended" It is true that he was returned home ill, but as soon as he was able to travel he went secretly over the mountains to what became West Virginia in 1863, to the farm of his wife's parents, the Robert C. Wingfields. That farm is at Ten Mile, in Upshur County.

In 1977 while we were doing research in that county, we located the Wingfield farm and had a nice visit with Artie Norville and her brother, who still lived on the old home place. They am also descendants of Robert C. Wingfield, and had lived all their lives there. Artie had taught school for 40 years in that county and at that time was in her 80's. Artie said that when she was growing up her family often spoke of the troubled times of that divided period of our nation's history and of how the community of Union sympathizers would get word to Henderson when they learned Confederate forces were in the neighborhood looking for deserters. It may have been before his desertion that his wife, Elizabeth Ann, took the children in a covered wagon over the mountains to the home of her parents, or she may have followed him them. Artie said that it was during this period that the big barn was built and that he helped in its construction. It still stands. At any rate, court house records show that two years after the close of the war the family bought land in Braxton County, W. Va. and it was in the family home there that my mother, Lillie, was married in 1896. Her father had died before her marriage.

NEXT - Afterword by Robert M Brady

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