July 8, 2013 (Monday)
“One nation, under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all!”
My grandfather, John Forest Lowe, Sr., gave his middle name to both his sons, then to me, his first grandson. He was born in Arkansas in 1882, 17 years after the Civil War. I have not successfully done genealogical research that can confirm my guess, but I think he was probably named, “Forest,” after a Confederate General known for his bravery who was extremely popular in the South.
My great grandfather on my father’s side of the family, John Fisher, was a Union Soldier, who fought for Ohio and was wounded at the Battle of Chancellorsville. After a period of recuperation, he returned to fight with the troops. He lived with his daughter (my grandmother) and her family in his last years, in Houston, and is buried in Evergreen Cemetery on Harrisburg Boulevard in that city.
On this 150th anniversary of the Chancellorsville battle, I pause to think of my parents and their roots, one born in Prescott, Wisconsin and the other in Lufkin, Texas. My great grandfather, Charles Prentiss Fake, died in Minnesota at age 54. My great grandmother then moved back to her original home in New York, after which her four sons eventually moved to Illinois, Colorado, California, and Texas. My grandfather was the one that moved to Humble, Texas, where he preached and operated a photography business. His son, my father, Charlie, met Jessie Lowe, my mother, whose father worked on the railroad that went through Humble.
My siblings and I were all born in Houston, Texas, and were never told much about the past. Life used to work that way. Many people of the 19th Century were too busy surviving to think much about genealogy and such. That was the case with our ancestors. Our parents had their hands full with kids, the Great Depression, a World War, not to mention a divorce and remarriage. The time was never right to reminisce about our genealogy. Didn’t seem relevant.
With ancestors on both sides of the War Between the States, I have good feelings when I say the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States of America as “one nation under God.”