SARAH ELIZABETH GANEY CLANCY
Submitted by Frank Butcher, updated
May 28, 2007
| Little is known about Sarah Elizabeth Ganey, except that she
took seriously God’s Old Testament command to populate the Earth and provided
her husband with an abundance of farm hands, mothering a total of 13 children. Her great granddaughter, Eva Rutherford, tells the story about Sarah that she wanted to pose for the charcoal portrait with her glasses on but couldn’t find them and finally gave up her search and sat down for the artist to do the drawing. Only when the artist was finished and she viewed his work did she remember where she left her glasses - on top of her head. All of Sarah’s descendants can perhaps blame any displays of absent-mindedness on genes from this lady. A feeling for the community and living conditions near Mount Ida where Sarah and Job lived in Alabama can be obtained from a paraphrased recollection written in 1915 by Henry Brunson, whose father settled his family in the area. “In 1852 my father came back to the valley and settled on the ridge that forms the Patsaliga Bluff. This county was then an uninhabited territory. At that time Henry Athey and Walter Compton lived in between Mt. Ida and the Patsaliga, and a little lower down lived Daniel Clancy & his sons Job & Daniel; then down at the Bluff lived my uncles Ben and David Brunson, and out from the river were Umphrey Capps and Mr. Holiday, and down in the bend Uncle V.A.T. Underwood lived. Those families made up the neighborhood on the river. There were one or two panthers seen about the swamp after we came back. There were a lot of deer and turkeys and fish in abundance. We could have lived fat, if we had guns and ammunition. We had flint and steel guns, but we only went to town once in a year and gun flints, shoe pegs and copperas were always first on the bill. The women used copperas in their dyestuff in dying thread to make cloth. My mother and sisters wove a lot of coverlets, counterpanes and four tredel jeans, etc.” One story passed down in the family and told by Leta Bell Clancy Reisel, Sarah’s granddaughter, is that during or shortly after the Civil War, a Yankee soldier was an unwelcome guest at Sarah’s table. After the soldier peppered his eggs, Sarah told him “Well, dern you, that’s the last of the pepper”, and put the shaker in her pocket. Why this episode made such an impression so as to be remembered by family members is not clear, except that it showed considerable spunk on Sarah’s part to berate an enemy soldier. In Alabama, the Clancys had grown their own flax from which Sarah made linen. According to granddaughter Allie, Sarah gave $50 in confederate money for her first cards (used to card wool or cotton), and $50 for Lizzie’s first pair of shoes. Allie also told about an incident in which Sarah’s son, Ben, accidentally cut off his toe. Sarah sent his brothers to find the toe, and she stuck it back in place with bread dough. It grew back, Allie said, but was crooked. The Clancys left Alabama for Texas in 1869, and the change was quite a shock for Sarah. The story is told that the Clancy family attended church on their first Sunday in Grimes County, and were appalled by Texans who wore guns to church. Coming from the genteel society of Alabama where such a thing was unheard of, Sarah considered Texas to be uncivilized. Sarah was also taken aback by the lack of civility in her adopted state. In addition to their many children, Sarah and Job also raised the daughter of a Jimmy Clancy. Frank Butcher 2007 |