William L. Robertson
William L. Robertson was born in Louisiana about 1830. He married Rebecca Morgan, who was about five years younger and also Louisiana-born, and they raised a large family in the piney woods north of Lake Pontchartrain. That country, east of the Mississippi and north of the lake, is called the Florida Parishes, because it was part of Spanish West Florida until 1810.
Several of their sons later gave their birthplace as Independence, a settlement on the line between Livingston and St. Helena Parishes that became part of the new Tangipahoa Parish in 1869. The family was living in the 3rd Ward of St. Helena Parish when the 1880 census was taken. W. L. Robertson was then 50 and Rebecca 45. At home with them were Howel, 24; Walker, 21; Tommie, 18; Virginia, 15; Evan, 11; Edward, 7; and Arch, 4.
The death certificates of six of their sons each name William Robertson and Rebecca Morgan as the parents. They are Thomas Hardie Robertson, born about 1854, who married Mary Killian and died at Independence in 1923; J. H. Robertson, born 14 May 1856 at Independence, who died at Lufkin, Texas, in 1926; Henry Walker Robertson, born about 1860 at Independence, who married Bertha Evans and died at Tickfaw in 1936; David Turner Robertson, born about 1863 at Independence, who married Fanny Varnado and died at Amite in 1929; Edward Robertson, born about 1873 near Amite, who died in New Orleans in 1950; and Arch, born 14 March 1876. Arch, the youngest, farmed in St. Helena Parish all his life and died in 1960.
During the Civil War a William L. Robertson enlisted as a private in Company D of the 9th Battalion, Louisiana Infantry, on 10 August 1862 at Ponchatoula, a railroad town a few miles south of Independence. He was almost certainly this William: he was the right age, thirty-two that summer, and his sons were being born around Independence in those years. The only other Louisiana soldier of the name was a single Missouri-born man of twenty, killed at Gettysburg. The company rolls show the Ponchatoula recruit present after he enlisted. The next record of him is a Federal roll of Confederate prisoners paroled at Port Hudson, Louisiana, in July 1863.
Port Hudson was a Confederate fortress on the bluffs of the Mississippi above Baton Rouge. From late May 1863 a Union army surrounded it, and the garrison held out for forty-eight days, one of the longest sieges in American military history. It surrendered on 9 July 1863, only after word came that Vicksburg, upriver, had fallen. The men of the garrison were released on parole, a sworn promise not to fight again until exchanged. A son, David Turner Robertson, was born about 1863.
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Cite: Heirology, "William L. Robertson (b. 1830)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/william-l-robertson-1830-a93af7.