Recent discoveries

The Georgia Archives' Vanishing Georgia collection holds a photograph of about 1898 of the house Charles C. Webb built in the northern part of Monroe County, Georgia, before his death in 1849, with his granddaughter Mary Jane Webb Ham standing in front of it.

All thirty-three letters and papers of James D. and William H. Wade, 1862–1864, have now been read from the scans of the originals, and their page here gives the facts and best passages of each, linked to the letter's images. They show James recruiting a company of Black soldiers in Louisiana in September 1863 and serving as a lieutenant in the 16th Regiment, Corps d'Afrique; their father, James M. Wade, a builder and then "in the real Estate business" in Williamsburgh; and Willie's homecoming with the nine-months men at the end of 1863, which their mother described in a note of her own.

A letter by his daughter Kate, preserved in George E. Brewer's history of Coosa County, Alabama, says Solomon Robbins, a private through the War of 1812, moved his family to Coosa County in 1832, "the first white settler to found a home in that County", and kept the first post office at Nixburg, "although it was then called Robbinsville". She names all twelve of his children, among them Eliza, who married W. D. Walden, "a merchant of Nixburg".

Three nineteenth-century accounts describe Westley D. Walden as a Nixburg merchant who sat in the Alabama House of Representatives in 1859 and was killed in the Civil War as a captain of the 59th Alabama, "just as he mounted the enemy's works" at Chickamauga. His service record has still to be read against them.

Peter Ross's History of Long Island (1902) carries sketches of the Wade doctors of Brooklyn's Eastern District, with a family tradition that the line began with an Edward Wade who came from England about 1800. Dr. Henry Albert Wade, a medical graduate of 1894, was elected a Fellow of the American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in 1909.

The Brooklyn directory for 1886–87 lists E. B. Goodrich & Son, grocers, at 82 Union Avenue, with Elisha Bates Goodrich and his sons Elisha Jr. and John O. living at No. 86, and Durlyn Wade (printed "Durling"), bookbinder, at 975 Lafayette Avenue.

The Wade brothers' Civil War letters can now be quoted as they wrote them, every quotation checked against the original pages. They show Willie as a private of the 47th New York State Militia at Fort McHenry in 1862, not the boy drummer the family had supposed, and that James's application of May 1864 to be made captain was turned down: "no commissions will be issued from these Head Quarters for the present."

His stone in the Shiloh Baptist Church cemetery, Coosa County, Alabama, reads "HARRIS McKENNEY, AUG. 2, 1823, JUNE 10, 1908" under a Masonic square and compass. It gives the day he was born, and shows that he went by his middle name, Harris.

The letters James D. Wade and his brother William wrote home in 1862–1864 show that James served in the 176th New York and was captured as a private in June 1863. His obituaries, written forty years later, had him a captain of the 87th who escaped through the swamps.

The bride of William Henry Wade Jr. married in 1893 as Ellen M. Thompson, but the 1881 census of England shows her as Ellen Mathilda Marritt, aged five, at Loughton in Essex. She took the name of William Thompson, the stepfather who raised her after her mother Eliza Keel came to Brooklyn.

The 1908 Alabama death record of Harris McKinney names his parents as Eli McKinney and Sarah McKinney, which favours Eli McKinney and Sarah "Sallie" Gresham over the other couples the tree has offered as his parents.