Missouri woman claims her father
fought in Civil War – and, he really did

People give Juanita Tudor Lowery a questioning look when she tells them, “My father fought in the Civil War.”

Lowery, 86, really never knew her father, Hugh Tudor, an infantry private in the Union army from 1864-65. Juanita was only age two when her father died in 1928 at age 81. And, he was 40 years older than his daughter’s mother, Mary Morgan.

Juanita, a Missouri resident, has come to know her father through paperwork, tintype photographs and two small diaries. One of the diary entries she indicates is dated March 23, 1865:

“This morning, Genl. Sherman and his the 14th Corps came in…We fell in and saluted him respectfully. It is very windy. We drawed rations. The(y) fired 15 guns to salute Sherman.”

Tudor, who was born in Iowa in 1847, moved with his unit through Kentucky, Tennessee, to the East Coast. He probably would have participated in Gen. William T. Sherman’s march to the sea but for an apparent case of the measles that kept him back.

After the war, Lowery’s father settled in Dawn, Mo., a farming community south of Chillicothe, with his wife Elizabeth Watkins. They had been married 50 years when she died in 1917. They had no children.

Three years later, at age 73, Tudor married 36-year-old Mary Morgan, who hadn’t been married before, but who had known “Mr. Tudor” her whole life.

Besides romance, Lowery says, probably there were practical concerns. Tudor likely needed a housekeeper and she security. And it seemed he still fancied having children.

To the new union came two daughters, HuDean Grace in 1924 and Juanita Mary in 1926.

Like many young men at the time, Tudor was eager to join the war effort and enlisted early at age 16. He wrote “18” on a piece of paper and put it in his shoe, so he could truthfully say he was “over 18.”

His diary entries describe the weather, the lay of the land – he probably hadn’t traveled much beyond his home in Iowa – and crops, which is what he knew coming from a farm.

He could read and write, but wasn’t the best speller. The Army provided a quick introduction to the ways of the world. One entry mentions a “horehouse.”

There’s a question about his knowledge of geography. At one point, he talks about the Pacific Ocean when he probably was looking at some eastern bay.

Two days before the entry about Sherman, Tudor writes: “We started of(f) again on march at 6 o’clock a.m. and crossed 2 creeks and through some good countery ... We got into Goldsburow (Goldsboro, N.C.) at 4 o’clock.”

Tudor didn’t experience major fighting. He wrote letters for other soldiers, probably to make extra money, and did a lot of trading of knives, trinkets and food. He sent gifts and cards home to his sisters.

Following the war, Tudor was a farmer and businessman – insurance, home loans, lightning rod sales. He founded the cemetery in Dawn for the predominantly Welsh community.

Lowery was interviewed in the early 2000s for the BBC documentary series, “Star Spangled Dragon,” about the Welsh in America. She told of her father’s experience in the Civil War, how he was among the troops reviewed by Sherman at the end of the war.

“That was the only time I teared up,” Lowery says. “I felt very proud that he was there.”

As for Lowery, she graduated from Chillicothe Business College and at 21 used money her mother had put aside from Tudor’s Army pension for a down payment on a house. She was employed in Kansas City at a World War II battery factory and at other businesses.

A few years after Lowery married Tom DeFord, the couple moved to Michigan and raised their children. They retired to Arkansas and DeFord died in 1992.

In 1996, at age 70, she married Russell Lowery, someone she had gone through school with in Dawn.

There are not many actual sons and daughters of Civil War veterans still living.

Several organizations try to keep track of the surviving “real” sons and daughters – children, not just descendants – including the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War, Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy.

The situations in these families are similar concerning vets in their 70s and 80s having late-in-life children, according to David Demmy of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War. People who hear about children of Civil War vets invariably are skeptical until you put pencil to paper for them, he says.

“You can see the gears running in their heads,” he says. “They’re trying to calculate, can that be possible?”

The lists of late-in-life children totals about 60, he added. And even figuring that all the real sons and daughters haven’t been identified, the number of Civil War children is likely less than 100, says Ben Sewell of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Sarah Anderson of the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War knows of 10 surviving Union vet daughters.

“There’s no one closer to the Civil War. The way I look at it, they’re a national treasure.”

Lowery doesn’t know about “national treasure,” but she appreciates her unusual heritage.

“It’s special,” she maintains.