Grandpa was driving (a horse) drunk when he died

It's the details rather than the dates that make family history interesting and occasionally those details sneak up on a guy.

Earlier this week, I was surveying digital back issues of Iowa newspapers looking for mentions of "Chariton" during the year 1863. I do this sometimes for various years because the earliest surviving Lucas County newspapers date from 1867 and the years before that are a black hole newswise.

But editors of other newspapers often picked up and republished interesting tidbits from their exchanges, so now and then something useful turns up attributed to The Chariton Patriot, our pioneer publication. Like this little item, published in The Sioux City Register on Jan. 31, 1863:

"The Chariton Patriot says that Thomas Etheridge of Cedar township, Lucas county, was thrown from his wagon while intoxicated last week, and injured so that he died in a short time afterwards."

Well, this was a family story not told my my maternal grandfather, an earlier keeper of family legends and lore. And the death actually had occurred on Christmas Eve, 1862, more than a month before this item was published in Sioux City

Thomas Etheredge, buried in Bethel Cemetery, Cedar Township, is not actually an ancestor of mine, instead the second husband of Eliza (Rhea) Rhea-Etheredge-Sargent, my great-great-great-grandmother. 

Eliza's first husband, her first-cousin (the Rhea family was very close shall we say) Richard Rhea, was a farmer and Baptist preacher who died on Nov. 17, 1839, in Sangamon County, Illinois, at the age of 30. Their children were Mary A., James M. and Elizabeth Rachel (my ancestor). Three years later, Eliza married Thomas Etheredge (born June 20, 1802, in Norfolk County, Virginia) and they had four children --- Virginia, Lucinda, Robert and Dempsy.

The family moved west to Jefferson County, Iowa, during the 1840s and arrived in Cedar Township, Lucas County, during the fall of 1854 after a brief stay a few miles north on the Lucas-Marion county line. Their farm was just north and east of the current location of Bethel Church and Cemetery and actually included the oldest portion of the cemetery, where they are buried.

My grandfather's only mention of Mr. Etheredge that I recall was the story that he was kind of mean and that this was one of the reasons Elizabeth Rachel left home to marry James Wayne Clair during January of 1853 when she was 15 and he was 16. The newlyweds apparently were fond of each other, producing an even dozen children before they were done.

By all accounts, the widowed Eliza was a very strong woman who made her own way in Cedar Township during the remainder of the 1860s, enduring the loss of two sons --- James M. Rhea and Robert Etheredge --- to the Civil War.

In 1870 she treated herself by marrying something of a toy boy, Edward E. Sargent, 20 years her junior, and they seem to have lived happily ever after --- until her death on Aug. 7, 1888, at the age of 77.