Parole of Wm. G Stigler, 12th Mississippi (1865)
22 May 2023
William George Stigler was 3rd Sergeant of Company I, 12th Mississippi Infantry when he was wounded at Sharpsburg in September 1862. He was captured in the Wilderness, VA in May 1864, by then reduced to Private, and was a prisoner at Point Lookout, MD to March 1865.
At the end of the War he was in Alabama and he was paroled by Federal authorities at Montgomery on 10 May 1865. Here’s his parole document from his Compiled Service Records, US National Archives, online from fold3.
He was then 22 years old, and unless the officer filling out the form made a mistake, was only 4 feet and 5 inches tall.
Theodore Barber Day (c. 1900)
14 May 2023
A fine post-war photograph of Theodore Barber Day, Antietam veteran and late Private, Company C, 2nd Wisconsin Infantry, thanks to descendant Sam Day.
Theodore’s great grandson Terence Lee Day and his son Daniel S Day researched and produced a Life History [PDF] of him in 2017. Daniel shared it on the FamilySearch database and invites feedback.
Another Assassination (1889)
12 May 2023
S.H. Whitworth (c. 1870)
[touch image to see the whole piece]
A man familiar with violence, Samuel Hudson Whitworth survived a serious wound at Sharpsburg in 1862 while a Sergeant in Company C, 12th Mississippi, and in March 1886 was instrumental in the shooting deaths of 23 black citizens in a vigilante action at the Carroll County Courthouse – the Carrolton Massacre.
In July 1888, about a year before his killing, he’d incurred the murderous anger of his neighbors by his actions resulting in the deaths of two men and wounding of two others, at a store at Rising Sun, a small rail station on the edge of his Leflore County, MS farm. Here’s a news story about that earlier incident:
[touch image to see the whole piece]
Notes
The photograph at the top was shared to Ancestry.com by Keaton Bryan in 2016; I’m guessing at the year it was taken based on his apparent age and clothing style.
The clippings here, online from newspapers.com, are from the Brookhaven Leader of 29 August 1889 (top) and the Vicksburg Evening Post of 16 July 1888.
The article about the Carrolton Massacre from the Mississippi Department of Archives & History, linked above, was written by Rick Ward, who also wrote a fictionalized account of the massacre titled Blood for Molasses: A Mississippi Massacre (2012); Ward refers to his protagonist as “Houston Whitworth.”
The Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad (Y & MV) was incorporated in 1882 and was part of the Illinois Central Railroad system.
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