On the way home from a long road trip to El Paso, Texas, we stopped in eastern Tennessee to do a little genealogy research.
We arrived at Logan’s Chapel Cemetery outside of Maryville, Tennessee, late on a Wednesday morning in October. Thanks to the photo I found on FindaGrave.com it was very easy to locate the gravestone of Elizabeth Daniel Thomas, my 3rd great-grandmother. To see the line of descent from Elizabeth to me, click here.

Next to Elizabeth’s stone is the marker for her husband, John Thomas.

On the other side of Elizabeth is Marion Thomas, their son.

After waiting for the sun to move long enough to illuminate Marion’s gravestone and take a picture, we were ready to head to the Blount County Public Library to look for some more information about these Tennessee ancestors.

There is a series of books in the library entitled, Gone So Soon: the Cemeteries of Blount County, Tennessee by Robert A. MacGinnis. In volume III, there is a list of interments in Logan’s Chapel Cemetery. Elizabeth, John and Marion are in the list and Elizabeth’s entry refers to an obituary included in the book. The obituary is a transcription of an article in the 27 January 1886 issue of the Maryville Times. Below is an image from the Maryville Times. The obituary appears on page 1, and the death notice is on page 5. This obituary tells us so much about Elizabeth.

There is no obituary in Gone So Soon for John or Marion. I searched the Library of Congress collection of historical newspapers and found this death notice for John Thomas. Unfortunately there isn’t as much detail about him as there is in Elizabeth’s obituary. I have seen other family trees that say he was born in Virginia in 1798, but so far this death notice is the only source for that date.

I looked online for records about Marion Thomas and I found this image of a card for a headstone supplied by the government for Union veterans of the Civil War.

When I saw the gravestone of Marion with the military information on it I assumed he was a soldier in the Confederate Army, but I was wrong. Company E in the Tennessee Cavalry was a Union regiment. For more information about the 3rd Regiment click on this link: https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-battle-units-detail.htm?battleUnitCode=CTN0003RC.

In the description of the database with the headstone cards on Ancestry.com, I saw that there were also some veterans of the War of 1812 whose headstones were provided. Considering the similar shield design on John’s and Marion’s stones, I looked through the ‘T’ section and found this:

Now, you will notice that in the cemetery field it says ‘Crooked Creek’ and it sure looks like ‘Texas’, not ‘Tennessee’. Otherwise, the rest of the information on the card, however scant, is the same that is on the stone. Well, there is no Blount County in Texas, and there is no Crooked Creek Cemetery in Blount County, Tennessee that I could find. There is another piece of evidence that corroborates my conclusion that this card does refer to John Thomas in Logan’s Chapel Cemetery.

The next step to find out more about John Thomas is to look at records of the War of 1812. If only he had a more distinctive name, the search would be much less difficult.

To find Elizabeth’s parents, I will search the records of Carter County, Tennessee, and hope I find some folks with the name Daniel.