Mami T-- Part 7

I learned from the ADAH researchers that he had not been killed in December of 1861, because there were Union records of his having been captured at Island 10, in April 1862. 

He was a Prisoner of War, and there are records of roll calls where his name is listed. He was exchanged in November 1862 at Aiken’s Landing near Vicksburg, Virginia. I have copies of these records.

He returned to his Company in Port Hudson, La. And there the trail goes cold. There is no record of his death in any manner, no hospital record, and no record of burial. No other records at all!

The fact is I have no idea of what happened to him. I did later find a discharge record for William McDuffey 1st Alabama Company I, Private.

Even though neither I nor the two Civil War researchers could find any record of his death; it had to have been accepted by the War Department that he had died somewhere, because Mami T began drawing a pension in 1909, at the rate of $120.00 per annum.

He never returned and was never heard from or about by the family again. I did ask the researchers how Mami T would have been notified and they told me that most likely it would have been word of mouth.

On her sworn affidavit which was filed in 1904 there was a place that she had to swear as to how long she had lived in Florida. The date that was typewritten in was May 15, 1824.

Since this could not even possibly have been a correct date, because she was born May 15, 1830; my thoughts are that whoever typed the paper up wrote the year in as 1824 where it should have been written May 15, 1842. I am sure it was a typo error!

And I believe that because she could nor read or write, and no one read it back to her that she was not aware that a mistake had been made before she made her mark. May 15, 1842 would have been her twelfth birthday and she most certainly would have remembered arriving in the Florida Territory on that date.

If this is correct; this then would make the Taylor family Florida pioneer’s; however no papers have ever been filed for a Pioneer Certificate by anyone in our family that I am aware of. Florida was still a Territory, and did not become a State until sometime in 1843.