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Saturday, August 19, 2017

The twisted tale of our Confederate Yankee grandfathers.

I am descended from at least three, if not more, Confederate soldiers, on both sides of my family, but from what I can gather, none were so much 'dedicated to the lost cause' as they simply did what they had to do to stay alive.

I have already written to some extent about Harry Hubbard, the Maine born mariner who settled near Fayetteville, NC on the eve of secession and fought for the Confederacy until captured, here. Today, I want to dig deeper into my mother's mother's father's family: the Cochrans.

For most of my life I was told that my great grandfather, Dr. Ira Lee Cochran, Sr., a dentist who died of a stroke at age 56, was an orphan. Several years ago, I discovered that this was not the case at all.

Dr. Ira Lee Cochran (1873-1929)
Dr. Cochran was born in Pennsylvania in 1873, the child of a former Confederate soldier from North Carolina and a daughter of a western Pennsylvania family. He was not the first generation in the family to be the result of such a geographically diverse union.

Ira's paternal great grandparents were Robert McClellan Cochran (1792-1873), a son of Irish immigrants, and Agnes Elizabeth McGinnis. They settled in what is now Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.

Joseph Lee Cochran, Ira's grandfather, was born July 21, 1820, in Cabarrus County, North Carolina. He grew up to become a farmer, a teacher, and a doctor, and somehow, in those days before mass transit and instant electronic communications, he got to know people in western Pennsylvania. How this came to be is the subject of much speculation.

On 11 October, 1842. Joseph Cochran married Elizabeth Balentine in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. The marriage produced two children, both born in North Carolina: Jane, in 1843, and Robert John, in 1846. 

Elizabeth must have died sometime in the late 1840s. The 1850 federal census finds Joseph married, to Ann Margaret Melone and living in Washington County, Pennsylvania. His occupation is listed as teacher. Sometime during the 1850s the growing extended family returned to Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.

On September 3, 1861, aged 41 years, Joseph mustered in as a sergeant in Company H, known as the 'Mecklenburg Farmers'. On September 27, Company H was assigned to the 35th Regiment, NC Troops, CSA.

 According to Official Records, Series I, Vol. IV, "This regiment was organized at Camp Crabtree, three miles west of Raleigh. Regimental officers were elected on November 8, 1861, and the regiment was mustered in for twelve months' state service. The Reverend James Sinclair, former chaplain of the 5th Regiment N.C. State Troops, was elected colonel. The regiment remained in camp near Raleigh for the remainder of 1861. Early in January, 1862, the regiment was transferred to Confederate service effective January 1, 1862. The regiment departed for New Bern on January 8; the men were reported to be 'fully and well armed' although their number was 'reduced...by sickness, principally measles and mumps."

On February 6, 1862, Joseph Cochran was discharged from duty for "defective vision". Joseph's health must have been deteriorating, because on September 11, 1863, he wrote his last will and testament. On November 26, 1863, at Davidson, North Carolina, he died.

Shortly after his father's death my great-great grandfather, Robert John Cochran, "enlisted for the war" on December 28, 1863, in Mecklenburg County. He was seventeen years old and orphaned. Some would speculate here that young Robert Cochran volunteered to fight for the Confederacy, but given passage of the Conscription Acts of 1862, in his grief he may have simply accepted his fate and seen no reason to forestall the inevitable. No records exist to tell us why either of these men enlisted to fight for the Confederacy. No evidence exists that Joseph Cochran owned any slaves. There were none mentioned in his will.

According to North Carolina Troops 1861-1865, A Roster, Volume: IX, Robert Cochran was, "wounded in the head at or near Bermuda Hundred, Virginia, May 20, 1864," during the battle of Ware Bottom Church. He returned to duty prior to June 17, 1864, when he was captured during the second battle of Petersburg. Taken prisoner, Robert was listed among those confined at Elmira, New York, July 30, 1864."

On May 15, 1865, Robert Cochran was released upon taking the oath of allegiance, and by 1872 was married and living in Pittsburgh with his wife, Angie Fleming. The couple had two children, Ira Lee, born in 1873, and a daughter, Edna Jesse, in 1875. Some have questioned why both Robert and his sister settled in Pennsylvania after the war. My theory holds that with their parents and their paternal, grandparents no longer living, and the South in ruins, neither had any reason to stay. It's also a fair indication that the family sympathies overall were with the Union.

Trudy Cochran Coltrane
Luella Farmer Cochran
Ira Lee Cochran, Sr. must have been inspired by stories of his polymath grandfather, Joseph Lee, because he followed a similar path in life, first becoming a school teacher, and later returning to school to study dentistry.

Dr. Cochran  was a graduate of what was then called Slippery Rock College, and established what must have been a fairly successful dental practice in Irwin, Pennsylvania for a time. On March 24, 1904, he married Luella Farmer (Frank A. Farmer, Martha Ann Bankert). Their third surviving child was my grandmother, Trudy Cochran Coltrane.

Why did Ira's family - his children, his wife, perhaps even himself - maintain that he was an orphan? Was it an active attempt to shield the family the embarrassment of being the descendants of traitors, or was it simply a case of facts becoming so muddied across generations that misfortune visited upon one was mistakenly attributed to another generation? We may never know with certainty.

I'm fortunate to know who I am, where my people came from, and to a small degree the kind of people my ancestors were. Many of my friends, especially those who are descended from former African slaves, often are not so fortunate, and must work much harder to discover their heritage.

I am not proud of my ancestors' participation in a war to maintain the institution of chattel slavery, whether voluntary or coerced, nor can I judge them too harshly, because the world in which I have existed for fifty plus years is far different from the world they had to navigate. We are all just humans trying to survive in a world that rarely makes perfect sense.

That said, Marcus Tullius Cicero said, “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?” 

To remain wilfully ignorant of what happened before you were born, in order to prop up a comforting delusion, especially one involving slavery and civil war, is a crime against one's ancestors.

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