Ever Widening Circle

Yesterday was Lucy, the dynamite widow with three husbands. Today we go further back — past Michigan, past the lumber mills — all the way to Virginia, 1863, and a 27-year-old corporal in a blue uniform who never came home.

Watch the Ancestor of the Day short film:

If you want the deep file first, I wrote about him years ago: American Civil War Soldier: Theodore Barber (2012). Today’s telling is the family version — the records on screen, the way I do it.

Theodore James Barber was born in August 1835 in Catlin, Chemung County, New York — the son of Grant Barber, a farmer, and Elizabeth Cummins. The 1850 census finds him at 15 in Caton, New York, one of eight children in a farmhouse: Harriet, Eli, Mary, Charles, Amanda, Nancy, baby Caroline — and Theodore. By 1860 he’d crossed into Tioga County, Pennsylvania. Somewhere around 1855 he married Clarinda Rose Short. Their son William Henry was born in 1857.

Now look at the family chart above — really look at it. Follow Theodore’s line back: his great-grandparents were Reben Barber/Barbour and Hannah Sands Chagum. Hannah Sands — the daughter of James Chagum and Mary “Molly” Barber. The founding couple of the Barkhamsted Light House Village. My people.

So when Theodore James Barber marched off to war, he carried Lighthouse blood in a Union uniform.

On November 1, 1861, at Titusville, Pennsylvania, he enlisted as a Private in Company K of the 57th Pennsylvania Infantry, under Captain Cornelius S. Chase. He was 26. He rose to Corporal. And for the next eighteen months the 57th carried him through the whole hard road of the Army of the Potomac: the Peninsula, Yorktown, Williamsburg, Fair Oaks, the Seven Days, Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg in December 1862, the Mud March.

Then came Chancellorsville.

The 57th belonged to the 1st Brigade, 1st Division, 3rd Corps. On May 1st, 1863, they marched and countermarched along the Plank Road and bivouacked near the Chancellor House. On May 2nd they took position on the extreme right flank of the corps — and at dusk, Stonewall Jackson’s flank attack fell on the Union line to their right and rear like a hammer. The division was marched to the rear in the chaos.

At dawn on May 3rd, the Confederates attacked. The regiment was moved at the double-quick and deployed near the Chancellor House. They counter-charged the enemy — and were driven back with heavy casualties. The brigade fell back about a mile and held its line for two more days.

Theodore James Barber died that day: May 3, 1863. My records say the death was gangrene from a foot/leg wound — that’s what the family papers hold, and I give it to you as the family holds it. He was 27 years old. He rests now in Fredericksburg National Cemetery.

I want to tell you one more thing, honestly, because the pledge is the pledge. In my 2012 post I shared a famous photograph — wounded Union soldiers being tended in a field hospital near Fredericksburg, taken May 2, 1863, the day before Theodore died. And I wrote what I still believe: I believe the gentleman laying down is my 3rd great-grandfather. Believe — not prove. I can’t prove it. But I’ve looked at that photograph a hundred times, and a granddaughter knows.

He left behind Clarinda — about 24 years old, with six-year-old William Henry. She would marry again, years later, to another Civil War veteran, Allen Porter — and if that name rings a bell, it should: they’re the “They Go Together” couple, the pair who died two hours apart in 1912 and were buried in a single grave. I told their story here in 2013. But that’s her story. This one’s his.

William Henry grew up, married, had a daughter named Ada May. Ada May married George Arthur Allen. Their son Alvin married Marion — my grandmother. Their son Rex was my father.

That’s the chain. That’s how a corporal who fell at Chancellorsville in 1863 reaches all the way to me, typing this in Louisiana in 2026.

Theodore James Barber. The soldier who never came home. Remembered.

🔍 MINI CONI HUNT: I hid my little Mini Coni somewhere in the family chart above — first one to spot her and tell me in the comments gets a shoutout in tomorrow’s Ancestor of the Day!

Your turn: Who do you want to see next? Tell me below — I read every suggestion.

One Ancestor of the Day each week is YOUR ancestor. Brick wall? Send it through my contact form at https://conidubois.fyi/contact.

#ad — My Temu picks of the day: Two that stopped me cold — both for boys like Theodore. First, a 3×5 “We Don’t Know Them All, But We Owe Them All” memorial flag, about $11 on Temu. 👉 https://share.temu.com/Va33rE5GHfC And this wooden sign: “Our Flag Does Not Fly Because the Wind Moves It — It Flies With the Last Breath of Each Soldier Who Died Protecting It” — under $3, almost sold out. 👉 https://share.temu.com/dNkRPiMvt4C And one more for the wall — a Pledge of Allegiance American flag acrylic sign, est. $4.60 after promos. 👉 https://share.temu.com/TvFvCrNtmhC

— Coni

Sources: Individual Report for Theodore James Barber, by Coni Dubois (service record: Private enlisted 1 Nov 1861, Co. K 57th PA Infantry; rank Corporal; died 3 May 1863 Chancellorsville VA; burial Fredericksburg National Cemetery; Find A Grave #6831641126) · Coni’s “Ancestors of Coni Dubois” research manuscript (birth Aug 1835 Catlin NY; 1850 census Caton NY; 1860 census Tioga PA) · American Civil War Soldier: Theodore Barber (this blog, 2012 — service record, Bates’ History of Pennsylvania Volunteers regimental excerpt, Chancellorsville field-hospital photograph) · 57th Pennsylvania Infantry regimental timeline, civilwarintheeast.com · Family tree chart, Coni’s own tree (theodore-chart.jpg) · Clarenda (Short, Barber) Porter death records — “They Go Together” (this blog, 2013)

#AncestorOfTheDay #EverWideningCircle

Yesterday I told you about Ernest Emmit Griffith — my great-grandfather, killed by dynamite on September 23, 1915. He was 26. If you missed it, the full story with the records is here: https://conidubois.com/2026/09/26/ancestor-of-the-day-2-ernest-emmit-griffith-the-morning-the-dynamite-went-off/

Watch the Ancestor of the Day short film:

Today is about the woman he left behind.

Lucy Genevieve Amo was born April 22, 1882, in Berlin — that’s Rockwood — in Monroe County, Michigan, to Samuel Amo and Mary Campeau. I have her birth record in my files, certified copy and all: Lucy J. Amo, female, white. By 1900 the family was up in Whitney Township, Arenac County — Lucy 18, still her father’s daughter.

On March 29, 1909, in Au Gres, she married Ernest Griffith. The license says he was 19 and she was 26. The witnesses were Albert and Katherine Amo — her people, standing up for her. The 1910 census finds them in Whitney Township: Emmit 20, a farmer; Lucy 27; and a one-month-old baby girl.

Then the hard years came, the way they came for everybody then. They buried a baby boy, Murther, who died of cholera at five months and ten days in August 1911 — and it was Ernest himself who stood informant on that death certificate. Read that again: the grieving father signed the paper. Then September 1915, the dynamite. Lucy was 33 years old, a widow with small children. Five weeks before Ernest died, she’d given birth to a daughter, Marion — the baby who grew up to be my grandmother.

Here is what the records say next, and I want you to sit with the timeline the way I did.

Eleven months after the dynamite, on August 4, 1916, in East Tawas, the widow Lucy Griffith married Francis C. Baker. The marriage return is in my files — Iosco County, record number 33, and you can read it yourself in the photos. He was 69. She was listed as 40. (Her birth record says 1882, which would make her 34 — I report the record’s words as written, and I keep my own count beside them. That’s the pledge.)

Now here’s the part that stopped me cold. Francis C. Baker was a Civil War veteran — Company 91 of the New York Infantry and Company A of the 147th. He’d filed his own invalid pension back in 1889. And in my files there’s his pension index card, plain as day: soldier Baker, Francis C. — dependent, widow, Baker, Lucy — widow’s filing, August 19, 1918, from Michigan.

So Lucy married a Civil War veteran nearly thirty years her senior, and within two years she was a widow again — drawing a Union widow’s pension. The 1920 census finds her back in Whitney Township in her father’s house, and next to her name the record might as well say what it says: Francis Baker, deceased.

She married a third time on November 10, 1924, in Standish — William Wesley Nicholas. The record calls him William W. Nichols; my files say Nicholas. He was 58, a farmer, a widower with four previous marriages. Lucy — listed as “Mrs. Lucy Baker,” 42, keeping house, twice married before — became his fifth wife.

The censuses carry her forward: Paradise in Chippewa County in 1930, Mackinac in 1940. And then the last record, the one that undid me.

Lucy died February 25, 1947, at 10:55 in the morning at the Newberry Clinic — pulmonary embolism, age 64. She’s buried at Forest Home Cemetery in Newberry. And on her death certificate, in the box marked “Name of husband,” the clerk wrote two words:

Emmett Griffith.

Not Baker. Not Nicholas. Emmett Griffith — the 26-year-old farmer blown apart by dynamite thirty-two years earlier, the father of her children. After two more marriages, after a Civil War widow’s pension, after a fifth-wife wedding in Standish — when they asked her, or asked for her, who her husband was, the answer was Emmett.

The informant on that certificate was Mrs. Alvin Allen of Germfask. My grandmother Marion — Lucy’s own daughter — reporting her mother’s death. My own family, holding the pen at the end.

She had a hard life — that’s what I was always told, and the records don’t argue. Widowed at 33 with babies. Married again at 34 to a 69-year-old veteran. Widowed again. Married a third time to a man who’d already buried four wives. And at the end of it all, her heart’s answer never changed.

That’s Lucy Genevieve Amo. The dynamite widow with three husbands. My great-grandmother.

🔍 MINI CONI HUNT: I hid my little Mini Coni somewhere in the Amo family photo above — first one to spot her and tell me in the comments gets a shoutout in tomorrow’s Ancestor of the Day!

🗳️ YOU PICK ANCESTOR #4: The last vote came up empty, so I’m trying again — and this time I’m counting on you! Here are your three choices:

1. Clorenda Rose Short Barber Porter (1838–1912) — my 3rd great-grandmother. In July 1912 her husband, a Civil War veteran, died at 9 PM — and two hours later, shattered by the shock, she walked onto the porch, cried out, and fell dead in the farmhand’s arms. The coroner wrote her cause of death as “a shock occasioned by the death of her husband.” They were buried in a single grave.
2. Theodore James Barber (1835–1863) — he marched off with the Union’s 57th Pennsylvania at 28 and never came home from Chancellorsville.
3. Murther Richard Griffith (1911–1911) — Lucy’s baby boy. He lived five months and ten days, died of cholera — and his grieving father signed the death certificate himself.

Your turn: What does your family’s death certificates say in the “name of husband/wife” box — and does it match the life they actually lived? Tell me in the comments.

Tomorrow afternoon: another ancestor, another record. And remember — one Ancestor of the Day each week is YOUR ancestor. Brick wall? Send it through my contact form at https://conidubois.fyi/contact.

— Coni

Sources: Individual Report for Lucy Genevieve Amo, by Coni Dubois (U.S. Federal Censuses 1900–1940; Michigan Marriage Records; Michigan Death Records) · Certified copy of birth record, Lucy J. Amo, Monroe County #160 Book C-77 (Coni’s files) · Iosco County Return of Marriages, quarter ending Sept 30, 1916, Record No. 33 (Coni’s files) · U.S. Civil War Pension Index, General Index to Pension Files

1861–1934 — Baker, Francis C., widow Lucy Baker, filed Aug 19, 1918 (Coni’s files) · State of Michigan Certificate of Death, Luce County, State File No. 1677, Feb 25, 1947 (Coni’s files) · Ancestor of the Day #2: Ernest Emmit Griffith (this blog, 2026)

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