Sir I will let you no with few words what you have to depend on to meet me like a gentelman with arms or stop useing my name in any way or I hope to live til I should see you again in peron and then we will settle the matter. I wish you to understand that I wish no great advantage of you I consider my self on a equel futing with every man in every way from a rascle to a colonel.
Joseph Ferguson

This was the family into which Candace Jane Ferguson was born on Christmas Day 1835, one of 11 children of Joseph and the former Jane Gragg who had married in 1813 in Kaskaskia, Northwest Territory (later Illinois). They had lived there and in Missouri before moving their family to Texas in the early 1830s.

Joseph died in 1839, and though the circumstances of his death and his place of burial are unknown, his activities and his reputation lend credit to the conjecture that he died at the hands of one or more of his adversaries within his own community. Jane, his wife, lived until 1875.

The Freemans:

William's family, by comparison to Jane's, seems conservative and orderly if one discounts his father, Alexander, who left his wife and young children in Tennessee sometime between 1846 and 1848 to participate in the Mexican War in Texas and never returned. William had been born in Hamilton County, Tennessee on 22 July 1834 to Alexander and the former July Ann Boswell. [Some in the family refer to her as Julia Ann, but a Bible entry has it as 'July'.] With her husband dead, July married Cedron Pyle, and together, with more than a few children, including our William and his Freeman siblings, they left for Texas where they established a farm.

Other than the fact that he grew to maturity in the home of his stepfather, little is known of William's childhood until he married Jane and became a member of the turbulent Ferguson family. The excerpts here, copied from two pages of a Freeman Family Bible, document William's birth and marriage to Jane.

Jane & William 1834 to 1899

Candace Jane was only three or four years old when her father died, and it is probable that at least a few of her brothers, who ranged from 10 to 20 years older than she, assumed a large role in overseeing her progression through childhood. Certainly they continued to intefere after her marriage to William Freeman which occurred on February 25, 1855, two months after her nineteenth birthday.

Jane and William's first child, a son, John Gilchrist, lived one day and died on the 31st of December 1855. He was born almost exactly 10 months after their marriage. Between the death of the newborn, John, and the birth of their first daughter, Amanda, in January 1859, two more sons, James Harrison and Champion Decelous, were born. Thus, in a span of almost exactly four years, Candace Jane gave birth to four children. Then there occurs a lull in this remarkable fruitfulness, and Jane did not give birth again until the fall of 1862. Exactly what transpired in those years is conjecture. In the photograph to the left, William wears a heart shaped pen on his chest. The history of that pin and its fate after his death would certainly add much to this story -- but both the pin and the details of the story it might have told have been lost with time.

It is known that Jane's brothers and their kin were deeply divided over the issues leading to the Civil War. And in such a volatile family,the conflict became so tense and enduring that some cousins and even brothers never spoke to each other again. William was a Southern sympathizer and travelled to nearby Shreveport, Louisiana and enrolled with the Confederate Southern Army. As his father, Alexander, had left William's mother to enter the Mexican War, so William left his wife and young children to join another conflict. Since Jane's next confinement did not take place until the fall of 1862, his enlistment was probably early in the war when he was about 28 years old. And here, we theorize... Either he was with Jane before his enlistment when their last child was conceived, or at some point after enlisting, he returned to Texas for a brief time and the child was conceived then. In any event, the conception of this child occurred in February 1862, marking the last or near last time they were together.

What is known from the retelling of the story by family descendants is that some of Jane's brothers, so enraged with William for his position on the War [and possibly his enlistment], made him pack and physically ran him off, and in the process, broke Jane's heart. She is said to have cried so terribly that her vision in both eyes was lost for a full year. When her last child, a daughter, was born in October of 1862, she named the baby girl, William Rebecca Mary Alis Freeman after her husband and her sisters.... and perhaps as an ever present reminder to her brothers of the husband they had cost her.

With William at war, her family torn, and her own heart breaking, there was reportedly a divorce action held at which William did not appear, and Jane was granted custody of children and property. If there was such a divorce, the record has disappeared from the county archives, and it was most certainly not Jane's choice. A possibility exists that rumors concerning William's death had reached Texas, and without a body to prove his demise, Jane's only available means of gaining control of their property and custody of their children was through a divorce proceeding. The date of Jane's photograph above is unknown, but undeniable is its depiction of a woman with sadness etched in her eyes. Like William in his post war photograph, she is probably younger in years than she appears.

Reportedly during the engagement at Vicksburg, Mississippi, William was taken prisoner and was sent with thousands of others to Camp Douglas, a Union training camp converted to a prison in Chicago, Illinois. How long he was there is unknown although some prisoners were released from the Camp under the oath that they would not rejoin the fight, and William did, for at least some time, live on State Street in Chicago. In the postcard below, he looks ill, and years older than the 30 or so years he probably was when the photograph was taken.

The postcard, written in William's script to his mother's sister and her husband says:

"William Freeman
Presented to my uncle George & Aunt Sally Siveley and fammaly as a token of love and friendship. Look at this and remember me. William Freeman
No. 719 State St.
Chicago Illinois."

[Note: William's brother, Matison married George and Sally's daughter, Julia Ann who had been named after his mother!]

William, at some point during or soon after the war's end, apparently did attempt a return to Texas, and his children heard and repeated various rumors regarding the circumstances of his death. They remembered being told that he died in Oklonam, Mississippi around 1862 and also that he contracted yellow fever and died on his way home, his body being 'buried' in the Mississippi River. There is documentation of the burial of a William Freeman, Confederate Civil War veteran, in Oklonam, Mississippi in 1862. However, there were many 'William Freemans' in that War and the identity of the man buried in Oklonam is undetermined, and some facts make it unlikely that it is Jane's William.

Since William and Jane conceived a child in February of 1862, and he was at the seige of Vicksburg which occurred between April and July of 1863, was captured and sent to Camp Douglas in Illinois and lived for some time in Chicago, the suggested date of his death in 1862 is probably inaccurate. There were, between 1865 and 1873, recurrent epidemics of yellow fever up and down the Mississippi River, and if his death occurred along the River from yellow fever, it is likely he died within that span of time. No burial site or record of his death has been found.

In any event, he packed a lot of experience into the years between the birth of his daughter, Amanda Jane in 1859, and the unknown date of his death. His children, quite small when he left Texas, knew little of him. When his daughter, Amanda Jane Freeman Boone, died in Weatherford, Texas in 1938, family members who supplied the information for her obituary even got his name wrong, stating that she was the daughter of "A. J." Freeman. One of Amanda's granddaughters who was 32 years old when "Granny" died, remembered Amanda's surname as Ferguson, not Freeman although William's children appear never to have adopted their second cousin and Jane's second husband's name. The four children who survived William, seem not to have learned much of him from their mother or else they failed to share the details with their own children. Perhaps for Jane, who had literally "cried her eyes out for a year" over his loss, speaking of him continued to be too painful. She made her statement of her love for William in the naming of their last child, and she waited several years before remarrying. Perhaps before her second marriage, she did speak to them of their father, but in their youth, the stories were forgotten in loyalty to the man who raised them.

Jane remarried in 1871 to her first cousin, Justice Davis Ferguson, son of Joseph's brother, Isaac. They had no children. A photograph of them taken near the end of the 19th century, shows a remarkable family resemblance.Old Photos & Brief Bios
Jane died at age 63 in 1899 in Parker County, Texas where she and Jess had moved to be near her daughters, 'Willie' and Amanda. She is buried in the Community Greenwood Cemetery in the southeastern section of the County. After her death, Jess moved to Wichita Falls and died in the town of Terrell in Kaufman County eleven years later.

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