Working backwards from me: a few assumptions

This 1868 engraving depicting Sherman's march to the sea is by

Alexander Hay Ritchie.

I don't know why my Savannah ancestors moved south to Thomasville, Ga., after the Civil War or why they later moved to Richmond in my grandparents' generation. But Savannah's history makes speculation possible and plausible.

Savannah is right on the Atlantic coast. Just north of the city is the South Carolina state line. Savannah was founded Feb. 12, 1733, by Gen. James Oglethorpe and a small band of settlers. They immediately named their landing spot Savannah. The settlement prospered, basing much of its economy on cotton and rice, and it became for many decades the largest city in Georgia.

The Civil War brought profound changes. Perhaps the biggest challenge in Savannah's history was being caught in Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's crosshairs in his March to the Sea from Atlanta (remember "Gone with the Wind"). Sherman and his troops left a swath of terror and destruction from Atlanta right through to Savannah in 1864. In that year's dollars, the physical damage is estimated to have exceeded $100,000,000. It was total, merciless warfare, in which plantations and farms, businesses and crops, and towns and livelihoods were destroyed.

On Dec. 21, the mayor surrendered the city, and Savannah was occupied. The war ended five months later.

Between the end of the war and 1900, Savannah's population increased slightly (farmers who had been wiped out sought jobs in the cities), but it fell from being the 41st largest city in the U.S. to being the 62nd. By 1930, it was no longer even in the top 100. The area did begin to produce rice and cotton again after the war, but heavy industry and manufacturing didn't emerge in the region until late in the 1800s and the early 1900s. Another blow was dealt in the 1920s: the boll weevil devastated the cotton market.

All this is by way of laying the groundwork for some assumptions about the movements of the Schmidts and the Dales. When Henry Schmidt, my great-grandfather, returned to Savannah after the Civil War, he came home to utter destruction. How to earn a living? How to feed his growing family? We know he left for North Carolina and was never heard from again. Perhaps it was because he was seeking work. Perhaps he was simply not able to cope with what must have seemed like insurmountable obstacles. Perhaps as he traveled north he died after being injured, by accident or design. Or perhaps he had met someone in North Carolina when he was mustered out of the Confederate Army in 1865. Whatever his reasons, the further north he traveled, the better were the conditions in the Antebellum South's cities and countryside.

I believe his daughter (my grandmother) and my grandfather probably left Savannah for Thomasville before the birth of my father to escape Savannah's shattered economy. Thomasville is on the Georgia-Florida border just north of the Florida panhandle. Sherman and his Union troops had come nowhere near there.

It's also plausible that with Georgia faltering, they then decided to move north to Richmond, which offered the advantage of a quickly recovering economy - the city soon became a center for cigar and cigarette manufacturing, for example. By 1924, my father had met and married his first wife in Richmond, and a Dale child had been born here. Eight years later, my grandmother Dale died and was buried in Richmond, and three years later my grandfather Dale died and was buried here. To the best of my knowledge, all of the Georgia-born Dales had by then left their battered state and were in Richmond, Washington, D.C., and Maryland.

And it seems to me that their reasons for abandoning Georgia, simply put, were employment and the opportunity to improve their lives. That's pure speculation, but it's plausible and it fits with the known facts.