Anecdotes.htm

I, John M. Gwin, have a tracing of the signature of my great-grandpa, "John F. Vardaman", taken from the floor of the top drawer of the old wash stand, above, at 7 Keiffer Drive, St. Albans, WV. I traced it there in June 1999, where the washstand had been given to my father, Adrian Sutton Gwin, who wrote a column about the furniture (below) published in the Charleston Daily Mail, the local newspaper for which he wrote for over fifty years.
On 20 Aug 1999, I received an exciting e.mail from someone who, from all indications, is my third cousin, Ms. Dona Lee Vaughn. She told me her paternal grandfather's mother, Mary Ann Flynn, is the sister of my paternal grandmother's mother, Julia Ann Flynn. Dona's brother, Thomas Lee and also a third cousin, also wrote, verifying Dona's letter. Earlier, it seems, both of them had read a post I had left at the Flynn Family Genealogical Forum stating my connection to the Flynn family and listing the several details my uncle, James B. Gwin II, had included in his collection. One of those details had been that Julia Ann Flynn, my great-grandmother, had a younger sister, Mary Ann Flynn,who had married a John A. Lee in 1861.
Alright. It turns out that Mary Ann's and Julia's respective husbands, John A. Lee and the aforementioned John Forsythe Vardaman, had served in the Civil War from Alabama. John Lee had already married Mary Ann in 1861, but John Vardaman waited to marry Julia until after the war. I had heard the story often from my dad, who'd heard it from his mother and grandmother, of how his grandfather, John Vardaman, had been at Appomattox with Gen. Robert E. Lee at the surrender, serving as one of many scribes writing individual orders for safe passage for each Southern soldier to return to their homes and had walked--WALKED--back home to Alabama.

An interesting aside here: While stopped to rest at a farm house somewhere in Tennessee, I believe the story goes, he admired a rose bush in the front yard and asked for a rooting to take to his sweetheart. Wrapped in a piece of burlap in his backpack and kept watered during the trek, the moss rose was planted in what would become their front yard in Alabama, where it thrived. Years and another rooting later, my dad took yet a third rooting of it from Aunt Maggie's house to his--our--home in West Virgina, where he planted it in our front yard. When we moved across town, he moved it, too, and today, the Civil War Rose lives on.*

Back to the story: In Alabama, he married his sweetheart, built his house, bought some bedroom furniture from a neighbor couple who were moving from there to Texas (the same bedroom suite, of course, with the wash stand which stayed in my parents' living room until Dad's death in 2001 and which now stands in our dining room in Las Cruces, NM, still waiting for Juanita) farmed the land, raised four kids, and served as Superintendent of Coosa County Schools.

But today the story gets better. Dona Vaughn, this new-found third cousin, tells me that John A. Lee was also at Appomattox for the surrender--they even have his "safe conduct" paper from Appomattox--and that he and Mary Ann had moved to Texas in 1871 from Coosa County. It's at this point that several pieces to the puzzle may fall together.

When John Lee married Mary Ann Flynn in 1861, John Vardaman already knew and was courting Julia Ann Flynn. But the war interrupted things, and both Johns enlisted in the CSA from Coosa County, Alabama, (we know John Vardaman enlisted in 1861 and John Lee in 1862, each in a different unit) and served for the duration, somehow ending up together at the surrender on April 9, 1865. And so I submit the following as an interesting and plausible theory:

I'm betting they walked home together, and that being with John Lee during the walk home may even have somehow influenced and reinforced John Vardaman's intent to marry Lee's sister-in-law, Julia, that December of 1865. The two couples were country neighbors for five or six years, and when the Lees moved to Wood Co., Texas, in 1871, it was their furniture that the Vardamans bought.

What do you think? Dona? Tom? Others?

John,
I'm certain your Plausible Theory is right. I'm sure Tom remembers, as I do, our being told as children that our great-grandfather John walked all the way home from Appomattox. I remember hearing that when he got home, so filthy and covered with lice, that he wouldn't let anyone near him until he had bathed, and that his old clothes were burned.

Dona
Dona Vaughn

Uncle James Bassett Gwin, Jr.'s, daughter, Cousin Juanita K. Gwin Russell, and her husband Scott, came to our home in Las Cruces, NM, in September 2012, and picked up the old washstand to take it with them back to Louisiana to be reunited with its other two members of the original bedroom suite--the dresser and bed. We had a wonderful (though all-too-short!) visit, and sent the old piece back home with mixed emotions. After all, it had been in Dad's and Mom's--and then our--possession for nearly thirty years! But it will be good knowing that all three pieces are back together again, and we look forward to seeing them when next we visit Scott and Juanita.

Below is a copy of the note Dad typed back in 1984 just after he and Mom returned from James' funeral with the washstand to West Virginia. Dad had taped it in a plastic cover on the inside of the door to the washstand's cabinet, and I took it out and scanned it yesterday when I disassembled the washstand for its trip home to Juanita's.