Ancestors

William Asbery Shanks

William Asbery Shanks was born on 14 April 1844 in Lowndes County, Alabama. He was seventeen when the Civil War began.

A summary of his Confederate service, compiled from his records and posted with his grave, says he enlisted on 12 February 1863 in Lowndes County. He served as a private in Company D of the 10th Confederate Cavalry, the inscription on his grave gives the same company and regiment. The 10th Confederate Cavalry was raised from Alabama and Georgia companies and rode with the cavalry of the Army of Tennessee. From 4 October to 15 November 1864 he lay in the Stonewall Hospital at Montgomery. He was paroled on 3 May 1865 at Hillsboro, North Carolina, while serving with the wagon train of General Anderson's cavalry brigade at Greensboro. That parole came in the days after General Joseph E. Johnston surrendered the last large Confederate army in the east, near Durham, North Carolina.

He came home to Lowndes County, and before the year was out he married Frances Jane Earnest, a daughter of Asa and Tabitha Ernest of the same county. The Rev. Joseph M. Scott married them. Their daughter Mary Frances, called Mollie, was born there on 6 August 1866. On 13 July 1867 William A. Shanks enrolled as a voter in Precinct 7 of Lowndes County, under the Reconstruction law that made every former Confederate state register its voters again before it could return to the Union. A James Shanks signed the same page that day. H. C. Goodwin, whose son George would marry Mollie, enrolled in the same precinct two weeks later.

By 1880 the family had moved south to Dead Fall in Butler County. William was 36. His wife Frances J. was 33, and both had been born in Alabama. Their children at home were Mary F., 13, William C., 11, Edward E., 8, and Herbert B., 6. More sons came later. When Mollie died in 1941 three brothers survived her: Asa Shanks of Bolling, Matt Shanks of Atmore, and Clate Shanks of Greenville.

In 1921, when Alabama counted its surviving Confederate veterans, William was living at Greenville. On 8 January 1922 he was admitted to the Alabama Confederate Soldiers' Home at Mountain Creek in Chilton County. The state ran the Home from 1902 for old and disabled veterans who had no one to keep them, and its grounds are now Confederate Memorial Park. He died there on 13 January 1925, aged 80, and was buried in the Home's Cemetery No. 2, plot 2-097. His stone reads "Co. D, 10th Conf Cav, Confederate States Army."

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Cite: Heirology, "William Asbery Shanks (1844-1925)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/william-asbery-shanks-1844-1925-c59bd6.