{"id":5368,"date":"2020-07-28T10:38:24","date_gmt":"2020-07-28T14:38:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/?p=5368"},"modified":"2020-07-28T10:57:37","modified_gmt":"2020-07-28T14:57:37","slug":"my-great-grandfather-and-how-cohen-got-into-our-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/?p=5368","title":{"rendered":"My great grandfather and how Cohen got into our line"},"content":{"rendered":"

William Jackson Morrison moved from the Silver Creek and Hall Creek area of what is now southwestern Burke County after he got back from the Civil War. He was the 4th son of Thomas Morrison and Fannie Epley. Being the 4th son and 2 of his older brothers having also just gotten back from a Union prison camp, along with one being killed at Gettysburg, there might have been some tension in the family.<\/p>\n

I only heard this once from a distant cousin who lives, if he\u2019s still alive, and has a picture of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in his bedroom. He\u2019s Ralph Morrison. Ralph did a lot of research on our lines, but wasn\u2019t a perfectionist when it came to research. But he knows a lot of our local Silver Creek Morrison cousins. So he heard stories along with doing his research in the library and courthouse.<\/p>\n

Well, Ralph told me that during the war it was said that William went missing from his NC Jr regiment. William was born in 1844 by the way, so do the math. It was also said that Fannie Epley Morrison, his mom was hiding someone out in the barn behind their house. So the implication is that she was hiding William in the barn because he would have been considered a deserter from the Confederate army, and the home guard would have been looking for him.<\/p>\n

There were indeed thousands of Confederate soldiers who deserted during the latter times of the war, so maybe William was one of them. Who really knows? I have always tried to put myself in the shoes of William but more of his Mom. She had 4 sons of age during the war. One was killed on the first day of Gettysburg. His grave is still not known, probably is in a mass grave near Gettysburg.<\/p>\n

Her other two sons, she absolutely knew were at Point Lookout Union prison in Maryland because her oldest son, Thomas Lafayette Morrison was a prolific writer who wrote home to his wife, Temperance Louise or Louisa Morrison, all throughout the war, including while he was in prison. It amazes me that he could write to her from a Union prison and the letters get to her. They are preserved and searchable on google. http:\/\/www.6ncst.org\/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=40&Itemid=43<\/a> .<\/p>\n

His brother, James Leander Morrison, was in prison with him. John Alexander Morrison is the one who got killed.<\/p>\n

Anyway, Fannie sees William coming home. He tells her of the horrors of the war and how all is lost anyway, so why risk losing his life for nothing? She has one dead son and two rotting in Union prisons with no way of knowing whether they will survive being in there. The letters home to Thomas\u2019s wife don\u2019t tell a rosy picture. So Fannie tells William he\u2019s not going back. Perhaps he had only gone home to check on the family and help in the fields for a short time and then head back to his unit. Regardless, Fannie tells William to stay out of sight until the war ends.<\/p>\n

Now there is evidence to show that William did not desert the army because he got a pension of some sort. I don\u2019t know how he got a pension, but back then he wasn\u2019t actually serving the Confederate army, but rather a regiment of the state of North Carolina, which obviously still existed after the war, unlike the Confederacy who\u2019d money was worthless when it ceased to exist. But to be sure of his pension it would be good to do further research because I\u2019m only relying on my memory right now.<\/p>\n

Then the other surviving brothers come home to find William already back. Tensions arise and William soon finds a way to live somewhere else. Just southeast about 30 miles and on the other side of the South Mountains is what is now the northwestern part of Cleveland County. I don\u2019t know how William Jackson Morrison met Amanda Whisnant, but he did and they married. There were a lot of German settlers in N.Cleveland County. Amanda\u2019s father, Absalom Whisnant, was a well to do man. He and his brother were in a lawsuit over the estate of their father. Absalom apparently won. My guess is, by looking at a map, Absalom\u2019s father\u2019s estate wasn\u2019t so much in money as it may have been in land and a couple of buildings along with some farm equipment, tools, livestock, and a little bit of furniture. And often the oldest son got the lion\u2019s share, but not all, of the estate. Here\u2019s a map of Cleveland County later on, but shows some properties. Look around the super imposed numeral \u201c11\u201d to look for homesteads with familiar names. https:\/\/www.loc.gov\/resource\/g3903c.la000586\/?r=0.108,0.176,0.434,0.26,0<\/a><\/p>\n

So, William and brothers are back from the war. William knows he\u2019s probably not going to inherit much if any of his parents\u2019 estate. Not that in the end that would matter anyway because William\u2019s mom, Fannie lived to be 101 years old and died maybe only two years before William did. And a side note here: When she was even up into her 90s, she would ride horseback to visit William and his family, who lived around 30+ miles away!<\/p>\n

So, William found it easy to be fortunate enough to fall in love with the daughter of a wealthy man. And it comes to pass that William decides to move to Cleveland County area near Casar and Holly Bush and settle down. I have a strong feeling William didn\u2019t have much money at all. But apparently he had enough good looks or personality and promise enough for Absalom to agree for him to marry his daughter. Side note, she had 8 kids and then died. He remarried Florence, who it appears also remarried after he died. Florence is in all likelihood Amanda\u2019s first cousin.<\/p>\n

I suspect that Absalom Whisnant took William into his businesses, that of farming, running a post office, a mill, and a general store. Then upon Absalom\u2019s death or even before, William was running at least the general store and the post office and a mill. Possibly not farming much by then. But I don\u2019t know. I do know for sure that he had his own mill with his name on the sack clothes that held the flour.<\/p>\n

It was at the general store that William had a certain Jewish fellow, a traveling salesman, come to call on him to sell him all sorts of goods. This man\u2019s last name was Cohen. William liked him so much that he used Cohen\u2019s name as the middle name of two of his own sons, John Cohen Morrison and James Cohen Morrison (Sr). And we know James Cohen Morrison Sr is our original eye doctor, father of James Cohen Morrison Jr. And now we have another Cohen in our family line after having skipped two generations. Dad wasn\u2019t too fond of the name, Cohen, thus leaving it out of our oldest brother\u2019s name and sticking in Thomas in there instead. So, I\u2019m glad that Alex and Emily have chosen to have the Cohen name back in our line, though my brother tells me they had no knowledge of this name being in our family previously. Cohen is a Hebrew\/Jewish name of the tribe of Levi.<\/p>\n

Dave (Q3)<\/p>\n

\"\"William Jackson Morrison<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

William Jackson Morrison moved from the Silver Creek and Hall Creek area of what is now southwestern Burke County after he got back from the Civil War. He was the 4th son of Thomas Morrison and Fannie Epley. Being the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5368"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5373,"href":"https:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5368\/revisions\/5373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morrison-q.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}