A Gun, A Pocket Watch, and A Surprise
by Deanna Hancock
My e-mail address is dhanco@ida.net
and I live in Idaho.
I had been researching my husband's ggrandfather (Joseph
Hancock) for several years.
We had come into possession of
a portion of his diary from the Civil War which I put online
to share with others. We also have his gun and a pocket
watch he carried during that war. Needless to say, he had
become a very interesting person to us and we had recently
received his military records. We still had no date or place
of death.
A few weeks later we received a large box of old photos
and other documents from another family member. Most photos,
of course, had no names. One did, however and was a picture
of his wife, my husband's ggrandmother.
Another was a very
old picture of a house with a man and woman standing in front.
The only identification on the back of the picture was an address
"111 Purchase St." No town or names. I scanned the portion of
the picture of the two people enlarging it as I did.
The
faces were then very detailed and she was most certainly the
same person that was labeled Lydia Ann Tyler Hancock.
We knew he lived in Milford, MA when he volunteered for the
Civil War, but were not sure where he was afterwards.
I had been in touch with a bookseller from Massachusetts, so
on a whim inquired about locating that address to determine
if it was indeed in Milford, MA. I heard back from him the
following day and was informed he had looked it up on his
Phone CD Program... it was located in Milford and he also
was in possession of an 1870 map of Milford that listed the
owners of each property. 111 Purchase Street was owned by
J. Hancock, which most certainly was our Joseph Hancock.
In
such a short period of time we acquired so much information
as well as pictures of them. Serendipity? Perhaps they wanted
their story told?
Included with the photos was a picture of
their tombstone ... listing 'Captain Joseph Hancock and wife
Lydia Ann Tyler' which included years of birth/death dates.
Submitted: Thu Jan 15 10:47:19 1998
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