Hi Elmer -

thanks for the info; I will check out the land Wm. C. Byrd owned in Wayne County. I dimly remember him also having some land south of Stony Battery on top of a small mountain.

The family history (recorded by my grandpa Byrd) is that Wm. Carroll Byrd lost all of his livestock to foraging Union soldiers and was unable to make payments on his farm there in Missouri. They then loaded up all of their portable possessions onto a large cart pulled by oxen and made their way down to "the land of opportunity" (as my grandpa put it) in NW Randolph Co. AR.

There is a 5 year gap between March 1863 (when Wm. C. Byrd sales his land in Iron Co. MO) and December 1868 (when he married his second wife in Randolph Co. AR) where I know NOTHING re him and his family.

Funny, after all these years of searching, I still do not know exactly when or where Wm. Carroll Byrd or his 1st wife Margaret Elizabeth Jackson Byrd died or are buried....

As far as I know, Wm. Carroll Byrd, his brother Robert Payne Byrd, and his brother-in-law Wm. Alexander Jackson all moved to SE Missouri in the late 1840s and 1850s. I have been able to confirm the CSA service of both R.P. Byrd(see below) and Wm. A. Jackson.

One of Wm. Carroll Byrd's Brigham cousins back in Stewart County, TN (along the Tennessee River, where Land Between The Lakes NRA is today) named his daughter Missouri Brigham. Methinks a LOT of Southerners had Missouri on their mind before the 1860s.....

thanks again for your help!

yer pard,

Ken