Born April 26, 1850, my maternal 2xGGrandmother may not have ever left the county her family had called home for decades if it weren't for the Civil War.
The daughter of Andrew Smith (1817-1893) and Rebecca "Sadie" Carroll (1823-1900), Nancy and her parents were born in Davidson County, North Carolina. See Nancy's family in the 1850 Federal Census:
Can't say for certain. I can only speculate why this Nancy and George would want to move far from familiar surroundings. But having learned Nancy's husband, when as a 17 year old Confederate soldier, had been in a Yankee prison at Hart's Island outside of New York City, AND had lost an older brother who had fought near their North Carolina home, might George and Nancy have wanted to leave their battle-scarred state? Start somewhere altogether new?
Boy, did they find "new." Wild and woolly Texas certainly was unique. By the 1870s Texas was in full-tilt Reconstruction. Much has been written about that period. Not an easy time for many folk.
Nancy Abigail Smith and George Freeman Hurley married the day before Christmas in 1868. She was 18, he was 21. By the next Christmas, they were in Titus, Texas. Did they travel by train, or wagon or how? The 1870 Federal Census has them in Red River County, near Clarksville. In September of that year, my great-grandmother Rebecca was born in Gray Rock in Red River County.
Source: Ancestry.com. North Carolina, Marriage Records, 1741-2011 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015. Original data: North Carolina County Registers of Deeds. Microfilm. Record Group 048. North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, NC.
By the 1880 Federal Census, the Hurleys were living in Mason County, Texas where Nancy lived the remainder of her life. Cousin Betty Foree told me this was the home they built outside of Katemcy. The cute little squirt on the far right was born in 1894. That gives us an idea of when this photo was taken. Please click once on the image to enlarge it. You just have to see it all! Isn't it a splendid photo.
"After settling in Mason County, TX in the early 1870's, Nancy Hurley had an ash hopper where she made her own lye for homemade soap; she carded the cotton grown on the farm, spun the thread on a hand turned spinning wheel, and knitted stockings for her family of twelve. Melissa Hurley Pirtle can remember the stockings she wore to school the first year.
Like other farm families, the Hurleys raised practically all of their own food: ground their cornmeal, as well as the coffee beans Nancy roasted; made syrup, pickles, hominy, and sauerkraut (ijn a barrel in the chimney corner, and dried the fruits. The men butchered and cured the meat. Nancy carried the water for washing, using a rub board, from the nearby creek or drew it by bucket from the hand-dug well. For supplies they could not raise, the men went in a wagon to Brownwood, staying two nights on the road and spending one night in the wagon yard.
Source: The Mason County Historical Book, Pub. 1976.
Hurley cousins tell me this family reunion pictured below was held about 1900. The more I research, the more familiar the surnames become of those listed on the second sheet.
I have two obits for Nancy, and one for George. She lived ten years after he passed in 1921.
What I want to know is, are George or Nancy the reason for the red hair gene that is passed down in my family? Nancy's great-granddaughter Elta once told this writer that her father, Art Willhelm, commented on his new granddaughter's hair color. Art said that baby Diane had the same hair that his mother Rebecca had when he was a boy. #Ginger
UPDATE on this last Monday of 2019: Wait. I forgot I had uploaded this back in 2014 from George Freeman Hurley's military file. George was also a ginger when he was a Confederate teenager:
