In a message dated 08/01/2001 8:57:21 AM Central Daylight Time, jwprice@easyon.com writes: > 1. ELLIS HARPER3 PARKER (JAMES G.2, DEMPSEY1) was born October 18, 1865 in > Sumner County, Tennessee, and died January 04, 1936 in Cottontown, Couldn't help but notice that James Parker named his son born just at the close of hostilities for Ellis Harper. Mr. Parker was definitely one unreconstructed rebel. The following is a quote from Walter Durham's book _Rebellion Revisited_, a history of Sumner County during the Civil War years. Ellis is mentioned a number of times throughout the book, but these last few paragraphs will sum up what he was all about: "In 1908 a former Sumner Rebel guerrilla still acrimoniously partisan at the age of seventy-one, was gunned down in Lebanon, Tennessee, when he sought out and assaulted a political enemy, Ellis Harper, reputed to have killed fifteen to twenty men during his life as a guerrilla, had not been able to escape the violence of his own past, "Most Sumner Countians who lived during the war and Reconstruction were unable to match [Confederate General William B.] Bate's positive attitude and creative public service. Few, however, lingered over defeat with the impassioned intolerance of Harper. Bate's life after the war had celebrated a South in renewal while Harper's had demonstrated only pervasive fear and insecurity. "Civil War and Reconstruction left deep scars on the land and the people both white and black of Sumner County. Notwithstanding nature's deliberateness, the scars on the land were the first to be healed." Knowing for whom our ancestors named their children often times tells us much about themselves. Joyce