Recently I wrote a series of posts on Delila Brown Ward (see here, here, and here). Today is a sort of follow-up to those posts, focusing on Delila’s husband, Alfred C. Ward.

Alfred (or Alford) C. Ward, my 4th great-grandfather, was a son of Absalom Ward and Nancy Ann Coleman and the grandson of Nathaniel Ward and Susannah Trail. Nathaniel had been a veteran of the Revolutionary War. The Absalom Ward family lived in Union County, South Carolina. Absalom and Nancy were members of the Gilead Baptist Church in Jonesville (Marby 293; Hair 64).

It was in Union County where Alfred would have met and married Delila Brown. Alfred and Delila are first counted together on a census in 1850, still in Union, already with their first two children (Ancestry.com 1850). Sometime during the following decade, they migrated to the Armuchee Valley area of northwest Georgia, where they were counted in East Armuchee on the 1860 census (Ancestry.com 1860). Alfred is the only one of his family who left Union County (Walker 406).

More details of this story are told in the Jordan’s Journey book and are not repeated here–as the focus of this article is not to duplicate the book but to expand upon what is already there.

As with many other men in Armuchee Valley (and throughout the South in general), Alfred soon picked up the call to arms and joined the Confederate army. He enlisted as a 1st Lieutenant in the 39th Regiment, Georgia Infantry in LaFayette on 4 Mar 1862.

Read More