Brothers in Arms: Otho J. and Thomas P. Mcmanus: Their Ancestors and Families

By Christopher McManus

Explore the lives of two orphaned brothers caught up in the maelstrom of the American Civil War. Thomas and Otho McManus both rose through the ranks and fought in numerous battles and skirmishes. One survived; the other was killed leading a battle charge seven days before the truce at Appomattox. The survivor married his brother’s widow. This study also traces their roots, explores the lives of their siblings and cousins, and follows five generations of their descendants. Otho McManus wrote more than one hundred wartime letters. Excerpts from those letters provide profound insights into family ties and battle experiences. The story of the brothers’ forebears is a window into American families in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The brothers’ parents, aunts, and uncles joined a great westward migration to the new states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Interesting sidelights include the last slave in Pennsylvania and an inheritance interrupted by the battle of Gettysburg. This study draws on forty years of the author’s personal research and more than a century of cumulative research by others. Family Bibles, letters, wills, censuses, obituaries, grave inscriptions, military records, and county histories are some of the sources consulted. Topics include such diverse areas as migration patterns, military experiences, occupations, patterns of child-bearing, and the historical setting of each generation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796010084

Book preview

Copyright © 2019 by Christopher D. McManus.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Rev. date: 11/26/2019

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Contents

Introduction

Part I: The McManus Ancestors

1. Before the Immigrant

2. First Generation: McManus Grandparents

3. Second Generation: The Father’s Siblings

4. Third Generation: McManus Siblings and Cousins

Otho McManus’ Life

Thomas McManus’ Life

Part II: The Pearson Ancestors

5. First Generation: Pearson Grandparents

6. Second Generation: The Mother’s Siblings

7. Third Generation: Pearson Cousins

Part III: The Descendants

8. Fourth Generation: The Victorians

9. Fifth Generation: Into the 20th Century

10. Sixth Generation: Mid-20th Century

11. Seventh Generation: Late 20th Century

12. Eighth Generation: Into the 21st Century

13. Ninth Generation: A New World

Appendix: Some sources

Acknowledgments

Maps

1. Distribution of flax growers in Ireland, 1796

2. Franklin and Adams Counties, Pennsylvania

3. Knox, Ashland, and Richland Counties, Ohio

4. Counties of Iowa and southern Minnesota

Tables

1. Basic Overview

2. First to Third Generation McManus Lines

3. First to Third Generation Pearson Lines

4. Offspring of Otho and Thomas McManus

These pages are dedicated to you, the reader. You are the most important element of this book. You transform dry printed words into vivid people, places, and actions; you use your own experiences to appreciate the depths of the lives and events recorded here.

No two persons ever read the same book.

- Edmund Wilson

Table 1. Basic Overview

Some points to remember when details are forgotten

Introduction

He has gone into service again – this time with a commission in his pocket and straps on his shoulders – Hurrah for Tom – Of such stuff is a hero made. Lieutenant Otho McManus honored his brother Thomas with these words in 1865 in Otho’s final letter home. Two weeks later, Otho was killed while leading a battle charge at Selma, Alabama.

Otho himself was a true hero, a veteran of more than thirty months of wartime service and frequent exposure to enemy fire. As Otho wrote in an earlier letter: In the last twenty days we have been in eight skirmishes, and have driven the enemy every time. Otho even endured capture to care for a wounded cousin on the battlefield.

To be called a hero by someone as heroic as Otho was high praise indeed. Thomas deserved the praise. Thomas saw nearly four years of wartime service, fought in eighteen named battles, and was severely wounded in his last battle. Fittingly, Otho and Thomas met for the final time on an earlier battlefield, at Chickamauga. As Otho wrote: While moving back to our horses, I was pleasantly surprised by meeting Tom whose regiment was moving out at the same time within a few rods of us = He was slightly wounded in the palm of his right hand -- Otherwise he was well -- His regiment was badly cut up -- his captain killed.

Brothers Otho and Thomas McManus deserve to be remembered and honored by future generations, especially for their long record of wartime bravery and endurance, but also for the difficult, impoverished, orphaned circumstances of their upbringing and for the children they lovingly fathered. This book is a brief history of their background, their lives during and outside the Civil War, and their descendants.

Jointly focusing on Otho and Thomas in this memoir is especially fitting. Not only were they brothers, close friends, and comrades in arms, but Thomas married Otho’s widow and raised Otho’s daughter as his own child.

~ o ~ o ~ o ~

Some seventy years ago, George McManus privately published a small green book, Thomas Pierson McManus: His Ancestors and His Family. That book remains the primary source for much of what we know of Thomas and Otho McManus’ ancestors in this country. Significant new facts and previously unknown family lines have recently emerged. Some older traditions and conjectures have been disproved. This present book attempts to merge new knowledge with the old facts and traditions.

George McManus’ book was a pithy, meticulous, highly readable, very human account. I will emulate his book as best I can. My target audience is two very different kinds of people. The first is relatives who want a concise account of their ancestry with colorful details, but who are bored by humdrum details such as exact dates.

The second audience is much smaller, the rare family researcher who wants as many details as possible as clues to pursue their own research. There are still many gaps in our knowledge of early McManus ancestors. But I hope that details in this book will help future family researchers to focus their own work and to avoid barren bypaths.

Even people bored by family history can learn a lot from books like this. The westward movement patterns mentioned in these pages mirror the mass migrations of our nation’s history. Individual family migrations are often revealed by where the children were born and where the family were enumerated at each census.

We can also discern family dynamics by noting age differences between husbands and wives, their ages at marriage, numbers and spacings of children, and similar details. Noticing death dates of mothers and their children’s birth dates lessens our initial idea of mothers frequently dying in childbirth, at least for the McManus family lines.

This book will frequently quote from the Civil War letters of Otho McManus. Otho wrote more than one hundred wartime letters to his wife over a period of some thirty months. His polished writing reflected his hopes, ambitions, fears, war experiences, and domestic concerns. If you want to read the full letters, these have been published with commentary under the title ‘Morning to Midnight in the Saddle: Civil War Letters of a Soldier in Wilder’s Lightning Brigade’ (Xlibris, 2012).

One caution to readers and to future family historians: some places and dates mentioned in these pages appear ambiguous but are not. For instance, ‘Richland/Ashland County, Ohio’ describes any locale that was in Richland County before Ashland County was created in 1846, but today is part of the latter county. Pre-1846 records for the locale will be found in Richland County, post-1846 records in Ashland. Dates like 1851/1852 usually indicate that the source was a U.S. census. Early censuses recorded age and not birth year. If the 1860 census recorded an age as 8, that person could be born in late 1851 or early 1852.

Why read this book? Why write this book? Ultimately these pages are about connections and patterns. To read them is to discover patterns within and between families, patterns like occupations, spacings of children, and geographic relocations. We are molded to a greater extent than we realize by our family heritage. Our families were in turn molded in no small measure by their parents’ families, which were molded by the grandparents’ family structures. Individuals from the more distant past are important too. Often forgotten after a generation or two, many of them have left legacies lasting multiple generations. These are some of the lessons to be gleaned from family history.

PART I

The McManus Ancestors

This section presents the paternal side of Otho and Thomas McManus’ family, namely, their father and their father’s ancestors. It also includes their father’s siblings and these siblings’ children. These relatives were Otho’s and Thomas’ aunts, uncles, and first cousins. Since the brothers’ parents died when the boys were young, the brothers were especially close to some aunts and uncles and their families. Otho’s Civil War letters often mentioned his Snavely and Glasener aunts, uncles, and cousins.

1. Before the Immigrant

As explained in the next chapter, Thomas’ and Otho’s immigrant McManus ancestor likely came from Ulster, a province of Ireland, around 1800. A family tradition that he arrived with sixteen pairs of white linen trousers suggests his family were involved in the linen trade. The 1790s were a particularly turbulent time in Ireland, culminating in the Irish Rebellion of 1798, and saw a resurgence of emigration linked to economic, religious, and political pressures.

Ulster

Historically, Ireland has been divided into four provinces and further subdivided into thirty-two counties. Ulster Province constitutes the northeastern quarter of Ireland and include nine counties: Antrim, Armagh, Derry, Down, Fermanagh, Tyrone, Cavan, Donegal, Monaghan.

The first six of these counties form Northern Ireland, which belongs to Great Britain; the remaining three counties are now in the independent Republic of Ireland. Although the term ‘Ulstermen’ is often used as a synonym for Northern Irish, we can see that the province of Ulster also encompasses part of the Irish Republic.

Map 1 shows the distribution of flax-growing McManus families in Ireland from a 1796 census. (Flax is a plant; linen is the product spun from flax.) The heavy concentration of McManuses in County Fermanagh suggests that the ancestral McManus immigrant had a nearly even chance of originating in that single county. In that census, also note the complete absence of McManus flax growers in the southern half of Ireland. An earlier general census,