Cousin Karen's meticulous transcriptions from Fold3 about my GG Grandfather John Rodgers (Rogers)

I have talked about the lasting impact of the Civil War in the impoverishment of the South generation after generation but the nearness of it has never come home to me until now, when I think of looking in 1946 at the bedridden old man, my Grandmother Parker's father, John Rogers, who in 1864 had been a child of 3 when his father was dragged out of his house in Franklin County, Arkansas and hanged by a Confederate troop for being a Union sympathizer. Grandpa Rogers almost surely would not have remembered it, but did anyone ask him? It's a fantasy that all Southern families sat around the fireplace or on the porch telling stories of their ancestors' lives and their own lives. Just as Americans whose grandparents and aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters and cousins were killed by Germans in the 2nd World War did not hear about the Holocaust for a long time, if ever, Southerners did not dwell on their losses. They were busy trying to stay alive.