RLP 290: Nancy E. Briscoe and the Civil War

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 290 Nancy Briscoe Frazier The Disaster of the Civil War in the Ozarks. welcome to Research Like, a Pro a genealogy podcast about taking your research to the next level. Hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder. A credited Genealogist professional Diana and Nicole are the mother daughter team at family Locket dot com and the authors of Research Like, a pro A Genealogist guide with Robin Wirthlin. They also co-authored the Companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA, join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research, and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (41s):
Let’s go. Today’s episode is sponsored by newspapers.com, your go-to resource for unlocking the stories of your Ancestors Hi everyone, welcome to Research Like a Pro a genealogy podcast.

Diana (54s):
Hi Nicole. How, are you doing

Nicole (56s):
Great How about you? What have you been doing?

Diana (59s):
Well, I’ve been working on getting ready for my legacy tree Webinar, which when we’re recording this is tomorrow and I’m excited to teach what I’ve learned about creating DNA network graphs and share a really fun case study that opened up for me through using A DNA network graph.

Nicole (1m 19s):
Yay.

Diana (1m 19s):
How, about you. What have you working, been working

Nicole (1m 21s):
On? Oh, Airtable just finished up the 2024 Airtable template and combined the timeline and the research log. I didn’t really combine them though, I guess that’s the wrong way to say it, but I linked them. So now you enter all your sources in the research log and then when you make your timeline, you can link to one of the sources as the source of that event information.

Diana (1m 40s):
So the purpose of that was to keep you from having to do duplicate data entry? Correct,

Nicole (1m 46s):
Yeah. Now you don’t have to try to put everything that you find from your research log back into your timeline. Initially we used the timeline as a place to put all your starting point information, but people like it using it as a tool all throughout the research project. So it’s nice to be able to put your starting point information just right in the research log with the date you had it so that You know when your starting point was and then anything new you find after a certain date. It’s more important with client projects that you keep track of You know what you find versus what you knew at the beginning, but, but it’s good to have that kind of separated in the research log by the date that you log it. And then the timeline can be a tool that you use all throughout to see everything in a chronological way and to analyze information.

Diana (2m 33s):
I like that because often we do, we need to correlate the new things we’re finding with the things we knew and having them all in one place to do that analysis and correlation makes perfect sense as well as streamlining the data entry and putting in the information about the source, the citation and all of that. So I’m excited to use that for my project. I’m planning on adopting it for the next study group project and taking what I had previously done in my other Airtable and transferring it over. So do you recommend doing that? Do you have any tips for doing the transfer?

Diana (3m 13s):
What are your thoughts on that?

Nicole (3m 15s):
I don’t ever transfer. I think it’s kind of a waste of time because it’s like an old project. So for if you’re starting a new objective, then I would start with a new base just starting from scratch. And then obviously if you’re wanting to use any sources that you previously had in a different base, you would just copy and paste those into the research log.

Diana (3m 35s):
So if someone is on like I am the third phase of a research project and I already have everything in an existing Airtable base, you’d recommend just keeping it there and keep working in that form to save time.

Nicole (3m 48s):
It’s not as a big of a difference between the Airtable bases that I would recommend spending so much time trying to transfer it over to the new one. I think you should just use the one that you already have.

Diana (3m 59s):
That’s great advice. And I, that’s what I’ve done in the past. I had several different versions of the Airtable Logs from the very beginning when you first started this. And so sometimes I’ll open up an old Airtable base and go, oh, this is a little bit different. But it’s not very hard just to continue working within that format. Whatever it was, You know. And if it’s something you really wanna change, you can. But yeah, I I have very seldom switched over from an old base to trying to get something in a new format.

Nicole (4m 28s):
Yeah, and if you do want to, then the best way to do that is to just set up the old base by rearranging the columns to match the new base and then adding any columns if you need to so that the columns match up and just highlight what you want to copy all the rows and then use the keyboard shortcut, CTRL C to copy that and then Ctrl via the new base to paste that.

Diana (4m 47s):
Perfect.

Nicole (4m 50s):
Well, for announcements we have our next Research Like, a Pro Webinar Series in February. And this will be identifying Henry Jacob van’s mother, a 19th century DNA case study presented by a Melanie Witt qualified genealogist. And she is going to be sharing how she is DNA to crack a difficult case for one of our clients. So if you haven’t registered for that, we highly recommend that you go and register for our 2024 Webinar series where you’ll see monthly webinars from Professional Genealogists and other members of the Research Like a Pro study groups. The next DNA study group is beginning in February, and so this is your last chance to sign up. We’ll close registration in a few days.

Nicole (5m 32s):
So make sure that if you’ve been thinking about it, if you’ve been on the fence, that you go ahead and sign up before we close the registration for that. And the next opportunity you’ll have to take a DNA study group will be in February of 2025 this fall we’ll be having Research Like, a pro study group without DNA, and that will be opening up this summer to register. If you’d like to see updates from us about new blog posts and new podcast episodes, then be sure to join our newsletter for coupons. We also have short videos on YouTube periodically, so we also will let You know about those. We hope to see a lot of you at the upcoming Roots Tech conference February 29th through March 2nd, where we will be having a FamilyLocket booth.

Nicole (6m 12s):
And we have some new things coming out that we’re excited to share about, but we won’t tell you yet. You just have to wait and see. But we’re looking forward to being at Roots Tech and just always love that conference,

Diana (6m 25s):
Right? It’s coming so fast this year. It will be so fun. I’m excited about the talks that I’m giving and your workshops and seeing everyone. Well, let’s begin our subject for the day, which is our ancestor Nancy Briscoe Frazier. We are going to talk specifically about her life during the Civil War. And I titled this blog post The Disaster of the Civil War in the Ozarks because I have been doing some studying and some reading on what it was like in the Ozarks and it was terrible everywhere, the Civil War, but this was a a particularly bad place to be.

Diana (7m 6s):
So we often realized that during the American Civil War, there was havoc wrought upon the southern states and in the north as well. And do we always consider, or do we ever consider the women left behind the soldier who fought may have many military records, and often we focus on them and think about the specifics and the hardships they went through, but we seldom have any kind of an account of the sisters or mothers or wives that they left behind. And so how do we even begin to understand what happened to the women during the Civil War? Well, we can research the men You know we always have to research the men when we’re researching women.

Diana (7m 52s):
And so we would research the soldier to learn more about his activities in the war and then dig into Historical accounts that can start shedding some light on what life was like beyond the battlefield. So Nancy Briscoe, my second great-grandmother was such a woman when the Civil War began. She was just a girl of 14 years old and she would’ve grown up quickly with the war coming to the Ozarks of northern Arkansas and southwestern Missouri where her family resided. She married a Confederate soldier in the midst of the war, and she would have witnessed firsthand the brutality of the gorilla warfare that was taking place in the Ozarks.

Diana (8m 33s):
And although she left no stories of this era of her life, we can learn more about her from setting the records and the history.

Nicole (8m 42s):
Well, let’s learn more about Nancy’s birth. In early years,

Diana (8m 45s):
Nancy was born between 1845 and 1850, depending on census record and her headstone and I tend to think that the headstone was likely more accurate, which was erected by her children. And it gives her the birthday of 15 February, 1847. And that does correlate well with the 1850 census where she’s a three-year-old in the household of her parents, John and Susanna Briscoe. The family at this time was living in Sugar Creek, Benton County, Arkansas, and Nancy’s older siblings were also born in Arkansas per the census. So it seems to be the most likely place of her birth, unless of course the family for a time went up to Missouri and she was born there and came back to Arkansas.

Diana (9m 32s):
But we have her parents, John and Susanna, and then we’ve got her brother William, her brother John, her brother, James Isaac, and then a sister Lucinda. And then Nancy in the census is the youngest child at age three. Now, unfortunately, this is one of the instances where the family was missed in the 1860 census. I have searched high and low for that census, done lots of page by page searches, and I have come to think that perhaps they were simply moving during this time. She did report her marriage to Richard Frazier as occurring in October of 1863 in McDonald County Missouri.

Diana (10m 14s):
So the family had moved to Missouri by 1863. Unfortunately, the courthouse burned that same year, so that would’ve been part of the Civil War destruction. The Union Army liked to come through and burn all the courthouses for whatever reason, and we only have the marriage record from her pension. So when I found her pension, that was so great to actually nail down the date of that marriage.

Nicole (10m 40s):
Yeah, it’s amazing how many things you can find in a pension record. It just seems like every pension application is so different and the file that they kept often includes like letters from family members in their own hand. And it’s so neat that you were able to find her marriage date there.

Diana (10m 57s):
It was. I think it’s interesting that she didn’t remember a specific date, but she did know the month and the year.

Nicole (11m 3s):
Right. We placed such a value on our anniversary date that how could you forget it? But I do sometimes forget how many years I’ve been married. I’ll admit

Diana (11m 12s):
I sometimes forget how many years you’ve been married too. But I’ve got it nailed down now. Now that I know the exact year you were married, I had that in my head. But back to Nancy, I was able to find some memories of early settlers in a county history. And they said in August or September, 1863, a raid was made on the town by a band of bush whackers and the courthouse with all the records there was fired to and burnt. So this raid on the courthouse could have been before that marriage in October, but with the upheaval of the Civil War marriage records in the county weren’t recorded again until 1865. So when we find that out, isn’t that so helpful to just have an understanding of what happened to the record and why we can’t find it?

Nicole (11m 59s):
Yes, it is so nice to just know. Okay, I don’t need to keep searching for that You know. I’ve exhausted all the Counties around it. The one that I think they were unburned. I think we’re good now. I know it was burned. It’s probably burned

Diana (12m 12s):
Exactly. And You know who’s to say that maybe something will come up in the future. Maybe somebody did keep recording and they kept it in their barn and it will show up someday. And in that case we’ll be really excited. But for now, I’m just going to go with Nancy’s observation. She was married in October of 1863. Great. Well, it’s always useful to look at a map and especially with this case where we have two different states involved, Arkansas and Missouri. And when we have families that are moving across the Border of a state and we’re having to look in records for both locations, it’s so good to look at a map. And so when I viewed the locations that were mentioned in the records, I saw that she was indeed living right on that Missouri, Arkansas Border on the west of both Missouri and Arkansas.

Diana (13m 1s):
And at the time that she was living there to the west was not Oklahoma, it was Indian territory. So the records named Benton County, Arkansas, McDonald County Missouri, and Berry County Missouri. And when we look at a map, we can see they’re all within a pretty close range. They’re all located squarely in the Ozarks. And I always think it’s interesting, this idea of these state boundaries. We look at maps and we see this line going through. But if you’ve ever traveled You know what do you do you see on the highway a sign? Welcome to Idaho You. know I often traveled up to Idaho from Utah to to see my parents.

Diana (13m 42s):
But if we didn’t have that sign there, we’d have no idea really. When we crossed the Border, and I think people in history probably had the same experience. They moved back and forth and they probably didn’t notice much of a difference between what state they were in. This was, I think, fairly good land. They all farmed the land to provide for their families. Some part of the Ozarks were not so great for farming. They were very rocky and wooded. And this seemed like someplace where they could actually make a living. ’cause they did live there for a while.

Nicole (14m 15s):
Wow, that just seems like an interesting place to live. Very different from where I live in Tucson, Arizona. And it is so helpful to hear about the climate and the land when you’re trying to fully understand the Historical and geographical context of the ancestors. So good job for finding that out.

Diana (14m 33s):
Thank you. It’s always fun when you don’t have a lot of history and the records are sparse to see what else you can find out to put some context into the research.

Nicole (14m 43s):
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Nicole (15m 24s):
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Diana (15m 35s):
Well, let’s talk about this actual civil war that was taking place in the Ozarks and how it may be affected Nancy, Briscoe and other settlers County histories tell us that during the Civil War, the inhabitants of the county up to that time were principally from the southern states, and a majority considered that their interests were with the Southern people. At the same time, there was a strong union element among them who resisted secession until the war was begun. When they cast their fortunes with the Confederacy, there was still another element largely in the minority in this county that remained loyal to the last. So that completely backs up what I have read and studied, that there were these competing interests all through the region with people changing their loyalties and then others being just staunchly what they were either union or Confederate.

Diana (16m 28s):
Well, Nancy’s family was for the Confederacy and her spouse. Richard enlisted in the Confederate Army on 27 August, 1862 at McDonald County Missouri. And he was enrolled by Captain Clanton for three years or the war, and entered his service with a horse valued at $125 in equipment at $2. So the Clanton name is familiar because Nancy’s mother was Susanna Clanton. So we haven’t quite figured out exactly who Captain Clanton was, but sounds to me like he was a relative. What do you think?

Nicole (17m 5s):
Definitely a relative, who knows? But yeah, the same general area and the same surname.

Diana (17m 11s):
Right, right. So You know that will be another area of research to dig into that. And I know that they were out of Tennessee, so my guess is that perhaps this clan of Clanton and Briscoes move down to the area together. I don’t know. It’ll be fun to research that more fully. So Nancy’s widow’s pension does give us more information. She says that Richard first served in the infantry than the cavalry, and we do not have any record of that infantry service. So all we have in his compiled service record is information about a service in the third cavalry in Missouri. We only have four service cards that survive, but they do give us a little glimpse into his service.

Diana (17m 54s):
He appears to have served as a teamster in the cavalry, possibly driving the supply wagons. And it does continue to talk about him being recruited and enrolled by Captain Clanton. So sounds like he was getting his relatives to come join him. Well, searching through the service records, and I always like to transcribe these in full, so I have that information down. We see that, as I said, he enlisted in 1862 and in October of 1862, he’s present on the muster in role at Fulton County, Arkansas. And there he is detailed as a teamster. And then in 1864, so jumping ahead about 12 months, he’s present on the company Muster role.

Diana (18m 39s):
And then jumping ahead again about 18 months to June of 1865, he’s on a roll of prisoners of War of Company F three Regiment, Missouri Cavalry. You know it’s the end of the war and his unit has surrendered at New Orleans. And that was it. That’s what we have. So with that, we get a little bit of information about when he enlisted not right at the beginning of a civil war, about a year in. And then he seems to have pretty much through the whole thing been serving in the Confederacy.

Nicole (19m 16s):
And right in the middle of that, he got married

Diana (19m 19s):
In right in the middle, he got married. And when I studied this a bit, the war for those in the Ozark was just pretty much stayed in the Ozarks. They didn’t travel too far afield. You know they’d go up into Missouri or back down into Arkansas. It was all very much localized in this area. So I’m sure that there were plenty of times where he was near Nancy and he would check in You know she’d be trying to keep the farm going. I would imagine they had to live on something. It was a terrible time for them though, with this war going, going on all around them. Right? So her pension application gives us a clue that Richard served in, she named it Marm Duke’s division.

Diana (20m 4s):
And in researching that, I found that was actually General John S Marmaduke, and he was a native of Missouri. He began the war in the US Army, but following a defeat in 1861, he resigned and secured a Commission in the Confederate army, which was very interesting. And by April of 1862, he was leading the Third Infantry, and by December of 1862, a division of the cavalry. So I thought that was fascinating that this leader completely changed allegiances as well.

Nicole (20m 36s):
Right. And I, I don’t think that’s all too rare. I think there were people who switched sides during the Civil War, even leaders. And it just kind of shed some light on the confusing time that it was and the different loyalties people felt to the people that lived around them to their country. And I’m sure for General Marmaduke, probably the feeling of failure with the defeat and the possibility of success on the other side was also a driving force. But it would be interested to read more about him.

Diana (21m 9s):
Well, we do have lots written about General Marmaduke and some of the things that I learned that during the first half of 1863, he operated independently by raid Southeastern Missouri from staging areas in Arkansas when he shifted tactics and uses cavalry to attempt a siege at Camp Gerardo Missouri on April 26th, 1863, he was forced to withdraw eventually as far as Helena, Arkansas without meeting the primary objectives of his rating operations. So this is what happened. They would be in a secure place in Missouri or Arkansas and then they would go out and try to cause problems for the other side and then have to retreat.

Diana (21m 54s):
And this went on through the whole war. Well matters did not improve for Marma Duke as the war progressed into Arkansas and leading his cavalry division in an attack on the now Union held Helena, Arkansas in 1863. He was driven back with severe losses when supporting troops under brigadier General Lucius Em Walker fearing for their own exposed physician failed to support the Confederate advance. So you can only imagine the lack of knowing what was going on. You know, you think somebody’s coming to take care of your left flank and they don’t show up and so you have to withdraw. Well, this little sketch really describe multiple skirmishes and raids at Arkansas and Missouri.

Diana (22m 40s):
And eventually the Confederate positions just kept collapsing and they had to keep retreating. And so with this fighting taking place right through this area where Nancy was living as a young woman and then as a young bride, I wish I knew more. I wish she’d kept a diary that would be so fascinating. But I really just picture her in probably a rough cabin trying to grow some vegetables. Who knows if they even had any type of a crop or anything growing. She probably was just trying to take care of maybe a cow or a horse or a pig or some chickens and and grow some vegetables. I also wonder if she was part of You know if there was like a family group there.

Diana (23m 24s):
We don’t have that 1860 census. We don’t know who else was right around her, but I would hope there’d be some neighbors or some family members that were there to be supportive.

Nicole (23m 33s):
Yeah. Well the Civil War seems like it was a pretty hard time, but as a young adult getting married, I think they probably hoped for better times ahead. So let’s talk about how life was after the Civil War for Nancy and her family. Unfortunately, the years following the war saw a great deal of Unlawfulness in the area and the county officials appealed to the US government for a military outpost. In 1866, the Fox Township was established and Richard and Nancy Frazier were listed together for the first time in the census of 1870. Residing in that location, their households included two sons, John, age two, and William age one with the close of the Civil War.

Nicole (24m 20s):
The couple started a new life together that would take them from the Ozark mountains of Missouri and Arkansas to Texas and then to Indian territory. In Oklahoma, the 1900 census reveals that Nancy was the mother of 13 children with 10 living. Having survived the Disaster of the Civil War, she would’ve developed the tenacity and courage to face moving west to another frontier. Her children memorialized her life on her headstone. She was the sunshine of our home You know, it’s funny to hear that because the little details we have about her don’t really shed any light on her personality at all except for the fact that she must have been courageous to go ahead and get married during such a scary time and to be a pioneer in the frontier of Texas in the early years of its history there in the late 18 hundreds.

Nicole (25m 11s):
But that she was the sunshine of the home. I wonder if that was You know, just a euphemism for mother or if that was her personality, that she was a bright and sunny person. It’s hard to know for sure.

Diana (25m 24s):
It is hard in the pictures, it’s hard to tell. But the one that I put in the blog post, she has a very pleasant kind face. And I have a picture of her with my grandmother as a little girl. And my grandmother, ed Bell’s got a doll in her lap and her brother Bert’s on the other side. And it just makes me happy to think of her having lived all through that and that now she’s in a time of peace and she’s got these grandchildren that she gets to enjoy. So it’s neat to think that she came through all that and she survived it and she had 13 children, holy cow, with 10 living. That’s, that’s just amazing.

Diana (26m 4s):
And she doesn’t look like she’s a very big woman in these pictures. So she was super strong woman going through all of that.

Nicole (26m 10s):
Yeah, she certainly went through a lot. And You know if by the end of her life that’s how her children wanted to remember her. She must have been a wonderful kind person because I can imagine losing my patients after having 13 children and being a cranky old woman. So,

Diana (26m 26s):
Well, we do know those stories of going to funerals and hearing these eulogies about these people who are so amazing and then we know the real story and we’re like, okay, well that was nice. But we know that they really did get mad sometimes and they weren’t as perfect as people said in the, in the funeral. And that’s okay. Everybody wants to be remembered. Well, and so we’ll just, we’ll just say she was a sunshine in her home. Leave it at that.

Nicole (26m 52s):
Well, we don’t have any other evidence otherwise. And I just feel like it’s okay to think about the positive aspects of our ancestors. I certainly hope that I’m not remembered for all the negative things that I’ve done and that people try to remember the good things about me. So let’s just, I agree. Give that grace to her ancestors and I’m sure she was wonderful.

Diana (27m 12s):
I love that.

Nicole (27m 13s):
Well, this was fun to revisit your research on Nancy and to think about her life. And are you sad that your year of writing about 52 ancestors is over?

Diana (27m 24s):
Well, You know this is a new year and I have set a goal to write at least one post a month on an ancestor to continue that. It’s hard for me to get one done every week because I have so many other things going on. But I thought I can continue this and do, do one a month. I have a lot more ancestors to cover.

Nicole (27m 46s):
And it was, you haven’t exhausted your source of ancestors to write about yet.

Diana (27m 51s):
Some of them get multiple treatments because I have more information, but I love just focusing on a specific part of their life. You know, maybe I will do another blog post on Nancy and talk just about her time in Texas. Yeah. Or her time in Indian territory. There’s so many aspects to a person’s life and I love the idea of developing those different aspects in new ways.

Nicole (28m 14s):
Alright, well thanks everyone for listening and we will talk to you again next week.

Diana (28m 19s):
Alright, bye-Bye everyone.

Nicole (28m 21s):
Bye. Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like, a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at family Locket dot com slash services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday. Subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket dot com slash newsletter. Please Subscribe rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.