Dear List Members, I found the following narrative to be interesting, hope you will, too. BERNARD AND MARY ANN The favored story in the family is that Mary Ann Reed was a nurse in the hospital in Wood County where Bernard Pyles was confined from June to August, 1862, during the Civil War, and that she met and cared for him there. The story may be true, or partly true, for they married in Parkersburg the following October. The proximity between the two families in Marshall County could easily lead one to suspect that they either knew or knew of one another before the wartime hospital experience. They returned to the family haunts in Marshall County to farm near Bellton and began to raise their family. When Bernard's father, Michael, died in April of 1880, Bernard was given $300, but no land, which was to pass through mother Martha to brothers James Lindsey and Hubbard Clark. Martha died in July of 1888 and it is presumed that the two brothers then inherited the farm. Bernard and Mary Ann had their tenth and last child, Grover Cleveland, in 1884 in Marshall County. At about that same time, their second child, Emma Jane, married Leonard Bonham and had two children, Charles and Lizzie May. At some time not long thereafter, the Bernard Pyles and Leonard Bonham families acquired a special car on a train and moved both families and their belongings westward. The group took one whole car for the trip to Kansas in 1886 and, after arriving there, went different ways. The Bonhams settled in Cleburne, Johnson County,Texas and Bernard's family were in Waverly, Kansas for a few years. Mary Ann must have been small in stature. In a picture taken with Bernard (in his Union officer's uniform), she appears to be half a head shorter than he, who stood only 5' 7" himself. By June of 1900 the families of both George Wilson (the eldest son) and Bernard were settled near the Red River in the Chickasaw Nation, Indian Territory. Their farms were near, and probably west of Colbert, a town named for the Chickasaw Colberts. Colbert was located on the old Texas Road just to the north of Colbert's Ferry, and was a fairly new crossing point from Texas for the Missouri-Kansas-Texas (Katy) Railroad as well. Both George Wilson and his brother Calvin Luther were census takers in 1900. Mary Ann died in February 1906 and was buried in Colbert. Bernard died near Colbert of pneumonia and is buried beside his beloved Mary Ann. Note: This was passed on to me by a friend.