52 Ancestors 2026: A Record that Adds Color – Tragic Endings

 

This story begins with the extensive Civil War pension file of Benjamin C. McWilliams. In the 1990s, I made a trip to the National Archives to examine his service and pension records for clues to his experiences during and after the Civil War. I was puzzled when the archivist brought out a large folder containing files for two soldiers—alongside Ben’s file was one for Hiram Carter. I was about to point out the apparent error when I realized the connection: both files were linked through Ben’s second wife, Mary Ann Case Carter McWilliams. Ben’s first wife, Mary Ann Cloud, had died in 1907, and he later married her first cousin, Mary Ann (Case) Carter, the widow of veteran and pensioner Hiram Carter.

More recently, my cousin Cindy sent me a large cache of image files containing the complete pension material for both Ben and Hiram. I have been cataloguing the 359 images and made detailed notes for the McWilliams file, intending to simply set aside the Carter materials for later study. While doing so, however, I came across a card that immediately caught my attention. It was a simple Form 3-1143, used to record family members who had served in the World War. Three names were listed:

Lyle R. Voorhees, deceased

Harry Carter, living

William Carter, living

The fact that one family member had served and died—and that Mrs. McWilliams had received compensation—piqued my interest. I suspected there was a deeper story behind this small document. There was.

Using FamilySearch, I identified all three men as grandsons of Mary Ann Carter McWilliams. I also found a death date for Lyle Voorhees: January 20, 1919. He had served with the 2nd Engineer Regiment, a unit that constructed fortifications and filled in as infantry when needed, earning him the rank of sergeant. Notes attached to his Find A Grave entry state that he died of lobar pneumonia at age twenty-two. This was a common complication of the influenza pandemic sweeping the world in 1919–1920 and serves as a stark reminder of the role disease has played during wartime.

But why did Mrs. McWilliams receive compensation? That answer lies in Lyle’s childhood. He was born on April 18, 1896, to James Voorhees and Mary Margaret Carter, daughter of Hiram and Mary Ann Carter. James and Mary had married in 1894, when Mary was just seventeen years old.

The young family’s happiness was short-lived. In 1899, a daughter, Ruby, was born, but she died on August 11 of that year. Within two months, both parents had also died—James on October 1 and Mary on October 10. The 1900 census shows young Lyle living with his grandparents, Hiram and Mary Ann Carter. A guardianship record from 1901 indicates that his aunt, Carrie Carter, assumed legal guardianship. Yet the 1910 census still places Lyle in the household of his grandmother and step-grandfather, Ben McWilliams.

Adding another layer of complexity, newspaper articles referenced on Find A Grave list Lyle’s next of kin as his uncle, Charles Carter, of Colorado Springs, Colorado, and note that Lyle graduated from high school there. This raises many questions. Was Carrie’s guardianship largely legal rather than practical? What circumstances led Lyle to live with his uncle in Colorado and attend school there? And what caused the deaths of so many family members in such a short span of time?

In the era before vaccines and antibiotics, diseases such as diphtheria and typhoid claimed countless lives. Childbearing and the death of an infant placed additional physical and emotional strain on young mothers—Mary Margaret was only twenty-one when she died. We may never know all the answers to questions surrounding events that occurred more than a century ago, but family tragedies shaped by disease and war have been part of the human experience for as long as humans have existed.

All of this—uncovered from a single card buried deep within a pension file.

52 Ancestors 2025: Rural — The Quaker Connection

 

This prompt could lead to a multivolume work covering eight or more generations of farmers, but for this entry, I want to focus on one family — the Clouds. Earlier in the year, I described this branch as “overlooked,” so I began reviewing their FamilySearch lineage and consulting secondary sources. In the process, I discovered a book about the Cloud family and was struck to learn that they were Quakers and among the earliest settlers in William Penn’s Pennsylvania.

The first Clouds in my lineage were William Cloud (1621–1702) and his son Robert Cloud (1656–1717), originally from Wiltshire, England, about 100 miles west of London. The Quakers suffered persecution in England during the mid-1600s, and when William Penn Jr. was granted proprietorship of a large landholding along the Delaware River in the New World, many—including the Clouds—saw an opportunity. William received a land grant in 1681 and likely made the move sometime in late 1682. Whether by design or accident, his land turned out to be located in Delaware rather than Pennsylvania. After several transatlantic crossings, Robert, a shoemaker, also settled in Delaware. For several generations during the 1700s, the family farmed in the Brandywine Hundred, New Castle County, Delaware.

Although the details of their farming operations are not as complete as those of the Barton County farms in the late 1800s, regional histories offer insight into what life was like. The newly cleared land supported fertile fields with a variety of crops. One notable product from these farms was butter, and these Quaker farms became known collectively as the “Butter Belt.” The area’s abundance of natural springs made it possible to build springhouses, where cool water helped preserve butter before it was shipped to market.

Life in the English colonies was changing, however. Robert’s grandson Nathaniel Cloud (1725–1802) married twice outside the Quaker faith, with ceremonies taking place at Holy Trinity (Old Swedes) Church in Wilmington, Delaware. Though Nathaniel remained in the area for life, his descendants—like so many others—were bitten by the migration bug. His son Thomas Cloud (1765–1841) moved first to western Pennsylvania and then to Ohio. The family’s farming tradition continued through Nathaniel (1791–1878) and Samuel (1819–1883), the latter being the father of Mary Ann Cloud, whom we met earlier in the year. From Ohio, the family moved westward again, to Iowa.

This is one rural family among many, with roots in an important center of early English settlement. The Quaker communities were known for their religious tolerance and good relations with Indigenous peoples. Their ideals and experience became part of the social and moral fabric of the English colonies. Philadelphia—the City of Brotherly Love—stood at the heart of these developments, a center of business, trade, education, and eventually, revolution.

Picture: 

Quaker Oats company website, https://www.quakeroats.com/, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53308037

Reference: 

Wilson, Raymond H. Sr., The Cloud Family, Houston , TX, 1953.

52 Ancestors 2025: Disappeared—The Children

 

It is not uncommon in family research to find relatives who seem to have dropped out of the records under mysterious circumstances. Yet, what struck this genealogist (and father) with a professional interest in public health is the recurring pattern of infant and childhood mortality throughout my family history. The evidence is everywhere: large families in the 17th and 18th centuries, the reuse of names for children who died young, and mothers who themselves died in childbirth.

For this post, I chose to focus on the 1900 and 1910 censuses and the listings of my ancestors in Barton County, Missouri. Why these censuses? Because in these years, mothers were asked not only how many children they had, but also how many were still living.

The inclusion of these questions reflects a growing national interest in public health at the turn of the century. The United States was expanding, and cities were swelling with people. Coastal and river regions, particularly in warmer climates, were plagued by yellow fever and malaria. In Kentucky—a major pathway for many of my ancestors—the rise of Lexington as a trans-Appalachian “Athens of the West” was abruptly halted by a cholera epidemic in 1833. As cities grew, the problems of waste disposal and sanitation became impossible to ignore.

By the mid-1800s, public health reforms were gaining momentum. In Massachusetts, Lemuel Shattuck (my 5th cousin, five times removed) championed sanitation measures. In London, John Snow famously linked cholera to contaminated water at the Broad Street pump. Advances in germ theory by Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and others, along with improvements in medical education, underscored the importance of separating water supplies from human and animal waste. Cities—especially overcrowded and impoverished neighborhoods like New York’s Lower East Side—saw the highest levels of childhood mortality, but rapid improvements followed.

What about rural Barton County, Missouri? Farms allowed for cleaner separation of wells, outhouses, and animal pens. Milk from cows on the farm was commonly boiled. Crowding was not an issue, but access to medical care was limited. Vaccines for childhood illnesses did not exist, nor were antibiotics available to treat bacterial infections.

Even so, mortality among children was a reality. Many of the older mothers among my ancestors lost between one and three children. We don’t always know how old the children were when they died, but we can imagine the grief. The mothers who had babies at the turn of the century and later may have seen some improvement, though I’d need to dig into statistics before drawing conclusions—that would be the subject of a scientific study, not a blog post.

The family photo at the top of this post, taken around 1909, shows my grandparents, Virgil and Marietta (Yount) Cassatt, with my Aunt Alta Mae. According to the 1900 census, Virgil's mother Susan lost 3 of her 6 children, and Marietta's Mary mother lost 2 of her 7 children. Together, Virgil and marietta had six children who survived infancy, but they also lost a 9-day-old baby boy, Frank, in 1907, and another newborn son in 1925. Their daughter Alta grew up, married, but died in 1942 at age 34 after a two-week illness. On my maternal side, a young uncle, Stephen Claire, died of appendicitis at age 6.

Today, we benefit from sanitation systems, vaccines, antibiotics, and hospitals equipped to care for the youngest and most vulnerable. Looking back, we can see how much progress has been made through public health, science, and medicine. Large families were the norm in those days, yet even with strong faith, supportive families, and close-knit communities, our ancestors deeply felt the pain of losing their children. Though some of these children may have lived only briefly, their memories endured.

52 Ancestors 2025: Diary - The Civil War Writings of Benjamin C. McWilliams

 

The Civil War in America was a harrowing experience for those who lived through it, especially those who served in the armed forces. While the war has been extensively documented in writing and photographs, for our family, the writings of my great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Cruiser McWilliams, reveal more suffering than glory.

The McWilliams family, originally Scots-Irish from County Armagh, Ireland, settled in the northern Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania after arriving in the American colonies. The early generations of the McWilliams family, along with the German families they married into, have been extensively researched by my cousin Cindy Cruz (starting here).

Benjamin was born on October 18, 1843, and grew up on the family farm in Chillesquaque, Northumberland County, Pennsylvania. Inspired by patriotism following the Battle of Gettysburg, he enlisted in the 16th Pennsylvania Cavalry in the summer of 1863. However, in October of that year, his horse went lame, and he, along with other dismounted soldiers, was captured by the Confederates.

His first stop was Libby Prison in Richmond, where his group of prisoners encountered a notorious gang:

Here was the first start of the ‘Raider’ of which 6 was hung afterwards for murder in Andersonville in 1864. I will trace them from prison to prison as I go along.

Shortly after his time at Libby, McWilliams was transferred to Belle Isle Prison, also in Richmond, where he described his first experience with hunger:

We was issued bean soup of the famous shick pear with more bugs than pear. Well, we had never had enough to eat since captured and we was ravenous with hunger so that the half loaf of bread we received tasted sweeter than any sugar we had ever tasted. We all felt curious to know if they would get enough to fill up on; filling was what we was after now.

In early 1864, he was sent south to the infamous Andersonville Prison in Georgia:

After 8 days we finally brought up at Andersonville. It was in the daytime and we had a chance to see as poor a country as ever layed out of doors. The timber came up nearly to the station and consisted of nine of the long leaf varieties. … A man by the name of White had charge of all who came there and we were turned into the stockade made of logs hewed on 4 sides and cut 20 feet long; set 5 feet in the ground leaving 15 feet out. … There was some stragglers there who was captured different places and sent there, perhaps 20 men when we got there. So we were the first lot of prisoners who arrived there.

At Andersonville, he again encountered the Raiders:

I drew my rations among the rowdies and cut-throats who were most all in the first squad, thinking they could get out first and if anyone came in for any cause, they were the first to know. They were most all Catholics and all the six who were hung were. I spent little time there, attended roll call, drew my rations and went back. My name being Mc they thought I was a Catholic and I never told them better. After about 6 weeks, when I went down for my rations, my sergeant, whose name was Jimmy, says, "Mc, there's no grub for you here. You played it fine but they have caught you. Don't blame you." So that confined me to one ration besides the toll from our sifter. I was in a shape to know who the Raiders were as I had come in contact with the "Molly McGuires"of the coal region and knew how they worked and it did not take me long to tell them.

From Andersonville, McWilliams was transferred to prisons in Millen and then Savannah, where he was fortunate to be present at the conclusion of Sherman’s March to the Sea. Like other Civil War veterans in my family, he eventually settled in Barton County, Missouri. He married Mary Ann Cloud (from an earlier blog post) and became a respected member of the community.

Much more of his writings have been transcribed, offering insight into the unimaginable hardships these prisoners endured, their interactions with enemy soldiers and guards, and the clever ways they used their wits to survive.

52 Ancestors 2025: Overlooked - A Hidden Branch of My Family Tree

This week’s theme is “Overlooked”—a family member I haven’t thoroughly researched yet. Choosing just one is a challenge because FamilySearch has provided so many ancestral lines to explore, each one a project in itself. However, one intriguing “overlooked” branch stems from my 2nd-great-grandmother, Mary Ann Cloud.

Her husband, Benjamin Cruiser McWilliams, is a well-documented figure in my maternal family history. A veteran of the Union Army during the Civil War, he’s a name that often comes up in our family’s stories. But what about Mary Ann?

I knew a little about her. Her parents were Samuel Cloud and Eliza Ann Case, and they had made their way to Iowa. Beyond that, her story was a mystery. While researching Benjamin’s pension record, I had an unexpected surprise. The librarian handed me not one but two folders—one for Benjamin and another for someone named Hiram Carter. That name gave me pause. What was the connection?

It turned out that after Mary Ann’s death, Benjamin remarried. His second wife was the widow of Hiram Carter. And here’s where it gets even more intriguing: Mary Ann Carter McWilliams’s maiden name was also Case. This discovery opened up a world of possibilities!

One of the first steps when faced with such a discovery is to verify the connections suggested by FamilySearch. Are these relationships accurate? This task requires careful digging and meticulous analysis.

Exploring Mary Ann’s lineage reveals an array of fascinating ancestors. Among the names are immigrants from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany, as well as Kentucky pioneers and soldiers who fought in the American Revolution and the War of 1812. Questions naturally arise: Who were these people? How did their paths cross? What roles did they play in Colonial America and the early years of our nation?

Researching Mary Ann Cloud and her ancestors promises to be an exciting journey. These “overlooked” lives deserve attention, and their stories are waiting to be uncovered. They will be overlooked no more.