Researching family history is a bit like unraveling a big ball of tangled yarn….if you have patience and perseverance, you might end up with enough yarn to make a nice sweater but if you give up too easily and cut away half the knots, you might only have enough for a pair of small mittens. The same goes with searching out family members from the past, sometimes it just take time, patience and perseverance. And with the right mixture of all three, you might be able to sort out some of your relatives! That was the way it seemed when a few years ago, I began to be interested in Ianthus and Hannah Walker, my great, great grandparents. I had seen beautiful portraits of both and I realized that I didn’t know too much about them-where they were born, where they had lived and what other children they might have had. I only knew that they were my grandfather’s– Ray Milton Rockwell– grandparents. Ray Rockwell’s mother, Mary (Walker) Rockwell was their daughter and Mary (Walker) Rockwell had a twin sister, Sarah (Walker) Carnegie.
Ianthus Walker
Hannah Storer Walker
It was only by chance that I happened upon Ianthus’s civil war card at a Veterans Administration and my interest was peaked when I learned that he was buried alongside his first wife, Hannah (Storer) Walker in the Brandt Cemetery in Brandt, PA. I was thrilled to see that the names and dates were still pretty legible. The quest was on!
Ianthus Walker Tombstone
Hannah Storer Tombstone
Ianthus W. Walker was born on July 13, 1836 in the little town of Sanford, NY to unknown parents. He gives no information about parents or siblings in his Civil War Pension Papers, just his birthdate and where he was born. His name first shows up on an 1850 census as a 14 year old boy living with a Thomas and Debbie Henderson, in 1860 he is married to Hannah Storer and they have a small daughter, Harriet. He is elusive in the 1870 census – his name can not be found. In 1880, Ianthus is living in Tioga County, NY and is married to Abigail (Carnegie) with several children, I have found out later through Ianthus’s Civil War Pension Papers that some of the children are Hannah’s and some are Abigail’s.
Ianthus Walker once farmed a large piece of land in Stevens Point but sometime after his return from Civil War, he moved to Brandt and was employed by neighbors to do farming and light carpenter work, at one time he worked at the Brandt Chair Factory. He came home a wounded man, was only able to work some of the time and as he got older and was steadily worsened by his wounds; he was barely able to keep employment at all. It has only been through Ianthus’s Civil War Pension Papers that I have been able to piece together this life story…I have posted numerous pages from his pension papers along with his and Hannah’s portraits, their gravestones, so you, too, can see how the Civil War had affected this small family from Harmony Township.
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