Hagerman - Searle - Yeager - Yeatts

Samuel and his family freed what slaves they owned and moved across the Ohio River to Indiana because of their opposition to slave- holding. Served in Civil War in Company H of the 37th Iowa Infantry (also known as the "gray beard regiment"), at the age of 57

from John Sanders \"Samuel and his family freed what slaves they owned and moved across the Ohio River to Indiana because of their opposition to slave-holding. Both sets of grandparents held slaves. The oldest four children were born in Kentucky, the remainder in Hendricks County, Indiana (near Belleville). \"Judging by the contents of many letters that they wrote back to Kentucky during the 1830s and early 1840s which still survive, life in Indiana at this period was something of a grim struggle. There are constant complaints of poor health (particularly the ague), poor crops, bad weather, loneliness, etc. One of the unending problems was providing education for the children -- schoolteachers, mostly young men, were scarce and unreliable. Due to this off-and-on type of education, members of the same family show, in their surviving letters, a range from fine handwriting and Shakespearean quotes to scrawls and near-illiteracy. In this period of casual spelling the family name appears in various ways on letters and documents: Beriman, Berreman, Berryman, Berriman. However, when written by any member of the family it was consistently spelled Bereman\". In October of 1845, they moved to Henry County, Iowa. A cousin, H.M. Rawlins, had already settled there. The 1850 Henry County census lists Samuel and his four sons (Jonathan, Alva, Thomas, and William) as farmers. When the Civil War began, all six sons (thus including Tilghman and Samuel Oliver) enlisted, as did the husbands of two of the daughters. Eleanor served as a nurse [from personal correspondence from Joan Bereman, beremanj@hotmail.com, 4 March 1999, and from an article written by John H. Bereman after 1963, received from Gwen Moore, historian of Henry County, Iowa, September 1999]. Samuel served in the Civil War as a \"musician\". He is described as having died of dysentery or \"bloody flux\", which he had contracted on about 26 June 1864. He had the rank of private at the time of his death [from pension office application materials, filed by his son Alva in behalf of Eleanor and dated 28 October 1864, in my files -- JTS]. He is said to have died in the tent of his son William, during a reunion [from personal correspondence from Joan Bereman, beremanj@hotmail.com, 4 March 1999, and from an article written by John H. Bereman after 1963, received from Gwen Moore, historian of Henry County, Iowa, September 1999]. \"

1856 Iowa State Census lists a daughter named Amanda, who was 2. Dis she die young?