This has been a slower week for me, but I’m sure it’s about to ramp up any day now. I met with my intern last week to talk about Libby Prison escapee Lt. William Reynolds who he has just begun investigating. Since he’s new to genealogy, I showed him how to search through military databases while we looked for Reynolds’ full records. Though we were unable to find them (they appear to not be digitized, unfortunately), we were able to find a lot of wonderful information on Lt. Reynolds and the Libby Prison escape. In addition, my other internship granted me access to some new paywalled databases that I had never used before and I hit the motherload for Reynolds! I was able to find LOTS of newspaper articles from publications not available through newspapers.com that revealed a lot about the lieutenant and his dramatic experience in Libby Prison. Given this information, I can say with much more confidence that my third great-grandfather would have most certainly heard him speak if not met him personally. It turns out that Lt. Reynolds spent years giving talks to the public, particularly the G.A.R. in Michigan. He was evidently quite famous and it appears that his account of the escape is the one that is used most commonly in narratives. In fact, some of the details he shared were the very same that I heard recently in a podcast about Libby.
I knew Lt. Reynolds was an interesting character (which is why I selected him in the first place) but I had no idea exactly how important he was to the Libby Prison and G.A.R. story!
Yesterday, I went back through the records in the Greenwood Cemetery office and located this gem. I still need to work on this a bit more, but it seems to me that Lt. Reynolds was important in the leadership of our local G.A.R. chapter and this note may lead me to the details about the erection of the monument in that section of Greenwood!
In addition to the rabbit hole I’ve gone into helping my intern, I’ve still been working on my research on Fred Weeks, the Wilmott family, and Mayor Jewell, but I’ve now also begun work on Jessie Branch. Branch is the woman credited with giving the City of Orlando the nickname “The City Beautiful” in 1908. I’ve been researching her life and the origin of the now-famous, but often debated nickname. Since there is a gap in the Newspaper archives for the Orlando Sentinel for the year in question, this has proved a bit of a challenge. To start, I began building a family tree for her in addition to collecting all the earliest mentions of the nickname in print. Curiously, I’ve only seen mentions starting in 1912, with the connection tying Branch to the nickname coming much later. I do, however, need to consult a source that’s only available in person at the West Oaks genealogy library that should shed more light on her. I'm hoping that I can make that happen early next week along with another visit to the Orange County Regional History Center archives to view the Mayor's Court dockets about Mayor Jewell's appearance in front of himself in 1908 for violating an ordinance banning the hitching of horses to awnings downtown. The story goes that he was the first to be arrested for the offense, appeared before himself, and fined himself $1. What I've found thus far is a much deeper story than this light-hearted tale and I can't wait to be able to share it with the public! I'll leave you with an interesting clipping (above) that I found celebrating Jessie Branch's 89th birthday which ends with a quote that serves well to end this post: “Now go away, I must get on with my work.”
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