Catching Up

From Lumey (Smith)...

What you see here is the Births page from Lumey (Smith) Presley's bible (seen in the 2nd photo on her Findagrave.com listing). At some point, she was given a new, smaller bible and copied all of this information into that, but had the forethought to hang on to these original pages. For that, I thank her, as this, and the back side of the same page, has been the best documentation I've found for her children, including Bert, who died young. This is the bible that was used as a form of ID when Marvin and Wortham Presley applied for delayed birth certificates with the State of Tennessee.

I've been trading emails with cousin Billy Bivens (grandson of Billie Bivens and Nancy Simpson) and Samuel Alsup, whose Families and Sojourners of Dyer County, Tennessee (1823-1930) WorldConnect file has been hugely helpful to me. Basically, Samuel is compiling a database of all Dyer County related individuals mentioned or listed in all the records and sources he can find, and then tieing them all together as families, citing his sources along the way.
Billy filled me in on what he knew of his great grandmother, Fannie Bivens. After her husband died, she married D. J. Rudder, a Civil War veteran and farmer, and is likely buried next to him in Oak Grove Cemetery in Dyer County. With this information, I helped Samuel to connect some dots in his database, putting the family together from the names he'd found in various records. Samuel's current working theory, based on a Lauderdale County marriage record and the 1870-1920 census is that Fannie is the Frances Lucinda Elder who married a John S. Bivins.
I've also received the Civil War Pension application packets for Thomas P. Presley and Mary Elizabeth Carpenter Presley. Thomas, as it turns out, joined the Union Army during the war and served with Company G of the 3rd Michigan Volunteer Cavalry, who spent most of the war ranging from the bootheel of Missouri down the northern Mississippi and all through West Tennessee along the Mississippi River. He enlisted at Jackson in February of 1863. The packet included a copy of their marriage record from McNairy County in 1866, but shed little light on Thomas' life before the war. Currently, I'm working to find evidence that Thomas was a son of one Joshua Preslar, Jr. who moved from Anson County, North Carolina, and ultimately settled in Henderson County, Tennessee. This direction was suggested to me by Ed Dunn, who has done a lot of work on the Johann Valentin Pressler family, who emigrated to New York, with parts of his family migrating south to the Carolinas and later on west through Tennesse. There is a 10 year old Thomas listed in teh family of Joshua Preslar in the 1850 Anson County census, and by 1870, Thomas is living with wife and children in their own home in Henderson County, TN. No sign of Thomas in the 1860 census after searching both HeritageQuest and Ancestry.com. Thomas was listed on one of his Union service cards as Thomas P. Presler, so things are looking good, but I still have no actual document that specifically ties Joshua Preslar to this particular Thomas Presley.