In my genealogical research I found a tangential family member -- he was the second husband of my great-great grandmother on my father's side -- who seemed particularly cursed. He fought in the Civil War on the Union side, was captured in Tennessee and spent a year in the notoriously awful and deadly Andersonville Prison Camp. He was released in April of 1865, as the Civil War wound down. He and his fellow ex-POWs were loaded on an overcrowded sidewheel steamship and made their way north on the Mississippi River. A boiler exploded on the ship, and it caught fire. More than a thousand men died, though the story got lost in the news about Lincoln's assassination. He survived and made it home. He and his first wife had two kids who died in infancy then his wife died, so he married my gg grandmother. She died three years later. His life did have a fairly happy ending, I guess. He and his third wife lived many years together, and he became a minister in the United Brethren Church. I wonder what his sermons were like.
Wow the most interesting thing i've found in my search (not i to my own family but when fulfilling a research request for someone else) was a line of incest where big brother married his little sister after his first wife died and then married his daughter after his sister/wife/mother of his daughter died. Hashtag Kentucky......... An interesting thing i "learned" about my family was that when they arrived in America, they arrived in Louisiana. They stayed in Louisiana. And when slavery ended and the Great Migration north happened, they remained in Louisiana. That state has the highest percentage of my grandmother's last name in the U.S. and a map that tracked the movement of that last name over time has that name moving out of state twice, just a little over the border into TX and then just a 3 people in Tennessee by the late 1800s. (i used quotations because i already knew they were from Louisiana, but never knew the extent. My dad says about his family "thats unsurprising. They dont really go anywhere")
Most of the good things in life that I have experienced have come from things going horribly wrong. You don't really appreciate the warmth of the sun until you have almost frozen to death, the luxury of wealth until you have been dirt poor. I would not wish a troubled free life on my worst enemy.
I literally recall a time in my early 20s when I realized I had almost nothing to seriously complain about and, while not exactly wishing I did have something to complain about, I did wonder if bad experiences would be good for my character. Well, I've had a number since then, fortunately none fatal (obviously) and so far no debilitating physical complaints, nothing seriously life-altering like prison or war, not even poverty. But painful family and social things, many of my own making and bad choices. Have they made me a better person? I'm not sure, but they have made me a lot less complacent and a lot more grateful for what I do have. And, I think, pointed me in a direction toward understanding a deeper reality, which you seem to have also found. To quote the Tao te Ching, at ch. 44, "Happiness is rooted in misery/Misery lurks beneath happiness."
This is called wisdom. There is a difference between knowing something, studying it, hearing about it and thinking you are familiar with it. Wisdom comes from living it. You can buy knowledge, you can only experience wisdom.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a more detailed treatment of the accident mentioned his name at least; I’m not sure what the survival rate was but I don’t think it was tremendously high. Edit: about 700 survived
A fun fact about the Sultana is that there were more people on it when it blew up then there were on Titanic when it sank, although Titanic was twice as wide and over three times as long (and I assume much taller as well).
It was seriously overcrowded, and a lot of the folks were so weak they could barely stand, let alone swim to shore. News traveled slowly back then, and only in newspapers; Lincoln's assassination knocked it out of the news cycle before it even got started.
Holy shit, that's a crazy story! You better write it @GrahamLewis before somebody else does. I feel bad for the poor bastard that uttered an innocent complaint in your ancestor's presence. I kind of picture him looking over and saying, "You think you had a bad day...."
That's a pretty cool genealogy story. The Sultana disaster is one of those historical events that has stuck in my head ever since I first read about it many years ago. Took place just a few miles north of Memphis. The 156th anniversary of the disaster is a week from today. Do not ask me why I can remember all that but not the years my children graduated from high school.
