Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Same page of 1840 Polk Co. MO census--Cousin Nicholas Pyle and Glenn-Tucker cousins.

I've seen this before--the strange juxtaposition of people not related to each other but with family connection to my generation from far earlier or far later. Nicholas Pyle was from the Pyles who later became famous (Howard, Ernie) but in the Revolution were notorious as Tories. His grandfather was the Dr. John Pyle of Pyle's Hacking Party. His father, Dr. John Jr, husband of my Aunt Sarah Brashier, lost an eye and part of a hand at that bloody Party, and after the war he and several of his Brashier in-laws and my Patriot Ezekiel Henderson, husband of Elizabeth Brashier (what young men do for love!), went off to where they would not be known, Greenville Co., SC. They were known, after all, and the Pyles went off to KY and Dr John Jr finally to Illinois. Nicholas, son of Tories, rushed to enlist when the War of 1812 gave him a chance, and served right through the Battle of New Orleans to erase the family shame.

And here are the Glenns and a Tucker. The John B. is the John B. E. Glenn who a few years later would have a horse die out from under him in Mexico. 6' 5" tall, black hair, black eyes, probably some Cherokee as well as Choctaw, but from the Renfrewshire Glenns (DNA shows), just south of Glasgow. Other Glenns were tall. His brother George was 6' 4" (we know because he went to Mexico too). A cousin of theirs in Texas, one these Glenns did not know, was even taller, and used to shoot down signs in Kerrville, Texas, whenever he bumped his head on one. Go Cousin Sam! The Glenns I knew in the 1940s were tall, and very dark (with new infusions of Indian blood since 1840). My grandmother, despite having a Glenn mother and being a Glenn two ways, was not tall--or was she just shorter than she had been in youth, like the rest of us? The sister I knew, the one who lived in 3 centuries but not very long in 2 of them, was extremely tall.

Anyway, I wonder if the Pyles rode by where the Glenns lived and if anyone in Polk County taunted old Cousin Nick about the infamous Massacre.

So all the descendants of Dr John Pyle junior are my cousins but none of their cousins who became artists and the war correspondent. I can live with that.

But as triple cousin Lois says, in the South if you are not kin you are connected.

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