Great minds think alike, but some are faster than others.
My aunt’s grandfather fought for the Union at Gettysburg and his name is on the Pennsylvania Monument at the battlefield. She is 92.
I have a good friend who was born 130 years after his grandfather. His father was 60 when he was born and the grandfather was 70 when the father was born. So if a veteran was born in 1845, he could have readily had a grandchild born in 1975 or even 1985.
There was a guy at my church when I was a teenager who was the son of a Civil War veteran. He was about the same age as my grandparents, though, so he would have had to have married a much younger wife and had a child in his old age to pull it off (which is exactly what his own father did). But it’s definitely theoretically possible; he could have done it.
If zombies can father children, we may have to revise some of these timeframes.
Indeed. Even leaving aside such President Tyler-esque accomplishments, I would be very surprised if there aren’t any Civil War grandchildren younger than 50. I don’t see why people keep dragging their dead or doddering nonagenarian relatives into this thread.
I just found this thread. At the time of the original post, I was 58. My Grandfather was born in 1839. My Dad was born in 1912. I was born in 1945. I just turned 66 five days ago. (actually, my Aunt was born in 1916 - and she has 2 children - 1 younger than me)
That is pretty cool. You may be an overall contender along with your other family members. I did some research on this issue about my grandfather as a grandchild of a Civil War vet (now 86) and even that was extremely rare. It is true that you can get some almost unbelievable jumps in age between direct descendants given the right circumstances but the chances of that happening in the exact right sequence to produce this is incredibly unlikely. I would bet some money that you and your family are among the very few that came make a legitimate claim like that so young. I looked for it on genealogy sites and that is the youngest I have heard of by a few years.
I think that it is pretty cool that my great-great grandfather not only served in the Civil War but lived through World War I and II and was around until 1949 when modern technology was really taking off. That is one incredible timeline to live through.
Many of these “widows” were much younger women in sham marriages to collect veteran’s pensions. (The Feds didn’t provide rebel soldier with pensions, it was done by the state’s themselves.)
When my great-aunt was young, she delivered telegrams and wires. She had some sort of minor leg disability or leg deformity that during that era made her not marriage material, so she lived with relatives and made her own living.
In the 1930’s, she was delivering telegrams and wires to an 80 something year old civil war veteran on a regular basis. They became friendly but she was oblivious to the fact that he was in love with her. So he proposed by telegram. She accepted, and they married soon after and had two children together before he died in the early 1940’s. One child died in infancy and the other died in an accident as a young adult, but barring that accident or other illness or calamity, he would be the child of a civil war veteran in his mid 70’s today.
I have some distant cousins who would qualify. I’ll protect their privacy in case they ever google their names, but I’ll give you this much:
Our common ancestor was my g-g-grandfather John L. Rawlinson (1842-1901) of the 3rd Alabama Cavalry. He married twice and had sixteen children.
His son George (called Reuben) Rawlinson (1879-1966) married a much younger woman when he was in his late 50s and had many children born in his 60s and 70s. At least 4- a son and three daughters- were born after 1951 (i.e. would be under 60 now); the youngest was born in 1958. (I’ll protect their privacy on this board but if you’re doing any kind of research that requires documentation I’ll gladly send you the more complete info by PM.)
John L. had grandchildren by Reuben and by his younger sons (he himself had kids into his late 50s) by whom he had grandchildren who would be in their 60s, but I’m not sure of the dates of all of them, though I’m pretty sure George’s youngest daughter is by far the youngest of John L.'s grandchildren.
I know of at least one person still around who is the daughter of a Confederate veteran. She is in her late nineties and her father was pushing 70 when she was born.
Sorry- I didn’t notice this is a zombie thread.
My mom’s family fought in the Civil War. She’s more removed from that, though - a great grandchild. She was born in 1959.
So that means my grandmother fits your description. 
I have never heard of such a thing but I have no reason to doubt you Sampiro. You are better at Southern history and genealogy than I am and I work at it. I would be fascinated to prove that is true and there are probably TV shows and web sites that would be as well. The last of the confederate widows got lots of attention through the early 2000’s and those were based on sham marriages. An actual child of a Confederate Veteran would be a huge (how can I say this politely) fascinating living archaeology find. There is probably some money in that for her if she is capable of doing interviews. You should probably let her and her family know how weird that is and what its market and historical interest is. As you know some, people are weird when it comes to the American Civil War and and latch on to anything they can about it. She may be one of a kind and a record that she needs to know about.
Oh, she knows- she went to UDC functions til her health failed a few years back. I doubt she’s alone- I’m sure there are some others out there because having families late in life used to be more common.
Helen Dortch Longstreet, widow of Confederate General James Longstreet, has only been dead 49 years. That’s not very long when you think of the fact he was a major player (a general at Gettysburg and Chickamauga) and their’s was a “real” marriage (i.e. not just a platonic marriage of convenience; no idea if it was consummated [there were no kids] but they were together for several years.) As an old woman she worked in factories during WW2. (Longstreet was unpopular in his later years because he was a Republican and he was critical of Robert E. Lee and other Confederate icons in his writings.)
There was a general flushing out of Confederate widows in the late '90s/early 2000s; every time somebody would write “last Confederate widow found” another would turn up. I think they are all gone now, but always a chance there’s another alive in the hills some place. There was kind of an asterix next to these women and a reason they didn’t make a big deal of it.
As mentioned earlier, all Confederate pensions were, for obvious reasons, paid by the states. The pensions weren’t a lot, but they could keep you from starving, especially if you already had a roof over your head. Widows also received pensions, how much (as a percentage of their husband’s pension) depending upon the state.
Pensions increased significantly in the late 1910s, the reason being that there weren’t that many veterans left and there was a wave of romanticism of the war going on. For every Civil War veteran on either side who lived to be 100 there were several who died before they were in their 60s- many of them died from effects of the war decades later, plus people didn’t tend to live as long then of course, so the states could afford to double the pensions or more without having to allot more money to them- in fact they could still cut the budget and pay a lot more than they had a few years before- so they did so. I’m not sure how much the average allowance was, but one of my ancestors was receiving $45 per month in 1918, and while that might not sound like a lot remember that the average income in Alabama was well under $100 per month, so it made a difference.
There were numerous Civil War soldiers homes but, again for obvious reasons, most old men didn’t want to go to them; they were generally for the poorest veterans and they were state run and not famous for the high level of care. What happened instead was that many of the veterans who were widowers started marrying, often platonically, to much younger women who would essentially agree to be their caregivers for their final years in exchange for which they’d get a little widow’s pension (which again, not a lot but we’re not talking about wealthy people here) when the husband passed on. You can understand the appeal of this to a near indigent 40 year old woman with three kids to support; this 88 year old man doesn’t expect to ride you like Forrest on his steed, he just wants somebody to bring him his oatmeal, and when he dies you’ll get enough per month to pay the rent on the shack you live in and then some.
Some of the women who entered into these relationships were really young- 20s and sometimes late teens. Again, you can see the appeal, you can even imagine their families kind of pushing them into it; “Honey, you’re 18 and there’s not a lot you can do that’s going to earn you more than a dollar a day, but there’s Mr. Claude and he’s 93 and doesn’t have any teeth, just look after him, sleep in a bed in the same room so you can turn him over if he starts to choke in the night, and when he goes on you’ll have $35 a month or so to chip into the family budget til you find a real husband.” The old men’s families often didn’t mind for two reasons: it gave grandpa somebody to take care of him other than us, and that pension she gets when he dies doesn’t cost us a nickel since it’s paid by the state and his stops when he dies anyway.
It actually started getting out of hand. The state auditors noticed that there was a big upswing in very old men getting married, and while maybe somewhere on Earth there really is a 23 year old who’s falled in love with an 86 year old it’s highly unlikely there are a dozen just in this one county. The pension laws were amended to exclude marriages contracted after a certain date or to women under a certain age, and consequently they stopped.
Alberta Martin, the old bat from Alabama who for a while was going to the SCV rallies and other questionable organization’s meetings* was one of these. She was big news for a while and they even gave her a substantial back payment since the funds were technically still there even though nobody had been paid a widow’s pension in many years. She married her Confederate husband when she was 21 with an illegitimate child (that’s glossed over in her wikipedia I notice- it mentions “she met Howard Farrow… and they had a son” but doesn’t mention she didn’t marry him). She gave birth to a son within a year of marrying the old man, but I seriously doubt it was the old man’s, especially since a few weeks after her husband died she married his grandson (remarriage automatically invalidating her right to a pension, but she was such a media sensation for a moment they overlooked this.)
*For anyone not familiar, Sons of Confederate Veterans used to be an innocuous genealogical group of sons/descendants of Confederate soldiers whose primary purpose, other than social networking, was preserving Civil War battlefields and historic sites and documents, but gradually- beginning in the 1990s and escalating in the 2000s it’s become far more political, neo-Confederate, and Lost Cause [“the war was state’s rights, not slavery”] focused; they’ve lost many members due to this.
Unsure if I am the youngest or not. My grandfather mustered in March of 1865,74th Pennsylvania Inf. at the age of 17. Obviously saw only moderate action and mustered out August 1865. My father was his youngest child, born in 1903. I was born in 1956 when my father was 52. That makes me 55, I’ll be 56 in May of 2012.
My Grandfather joined the Illinois Infantry in 1865 at 15 years old. His step father signed for him. Three months later he mustered out in nashville TN when the war ended. He never went home. At age 75 in 1923 he fathered my Dad. My grandmother who was born in 1891 was 32 years old. She died in 1989 at 98 tears old. I am 63 and have 2 younger brothers and a baby sister who was born in October of 1957. I have my grandfather’s civil war record which states that the government bought back his saber and belt for $3.
I don’t know if my sister is the youngest but we certainly have to be amoung a very few who can say their grandfather fought in the civil war.
That’s amazing! How old was your grandfather when he died?
(What is it called when a zombie dies and comes back a second time?)
My college roommate is now in his mid 30s, and was the grandchild of a Civil War vet. I believe his father was in his 60s when he was born, and had similarly been fathered very late in his father’s life. My roommate even has a younger brother, who is in his late 20s now, and certainly has to be a prime contender for youngest Civil War grandchild.