Sandusky, James Lewis
(June 12, 1843 - June 22, 1912)Once I asked the listees of the Sandusky website whether they had information on a Civil War soldier named James L. Sandusky. Nobody replied and I forgot the matter. Recently I learned that Frank Wolford Sandusky died October 25, 2003, in the St. Francis Nursing Home at Lebanon, Kentucky, and his obituary appeared in The Lebanon Enterprise, October 31, 2003. His wife, six children, 24 grandchildren, and 33 great-grandchildren survived him.
It gave me an opportunity to take care of unfinished business. When I contacted the family by telephone, Earl Sandusky, in his seventies, was unable to go beyond his father and grandfather, Frank Wolford and John Woodford Sandusky, respectively, and referred me to a 83-year-old neighbor, John Hundley, who was familiar with the grave of James Sandusky in Clementsville, a tiny settlement in Casey County, Kentucky. The grave is supposedly in a Sandusky cemetery on Chicken Gizzard's Road. It has a relatively new stone. It meant that someone, whether living in Clementsville or farther away, looked after it. I'd like to know who it is. When Hundley first saw it, the grave was covered with weeds and protected by rattlesnakes. He was afraid to go closer than 20 feet from the grave.
With the name of the soldier to work with, I consulted my files and found, in Patrick Anderson's work, that James Lewis Sandusky was born June 12, 1843, the son of Woodford Sandusky and Paulina Coppage, and raised on a farm in Casey County. Due to two soldiers with the same first name but with different middle names in the Kentucky Cavalry, it's possible that the files of the two soldiers got intertwined and they weren't clear to me.
After solving the jigsaw puzzle, I traced Earl Sandusky's Polish lineage back to Frank 8, John Woodford 7, James 6, Woodford 5, Jacob 4, Samuel 3, Andrew 2, and Anthony Sadowski, who came from Poland in the early 1700s.
Going back to James Sandusky, if I don't mix him up with the other one, he served with Company B, 1st Kentucky Cavalry, from July 23, 1861, to December 31, 1864. He lost his horse and equipment on March 23, 1863, when he was captured by Confederate troops during an engagement at Danville, Kentucky.
Although Sarah F. Harding married Samuel Sandusky on March 31, 1864, in Casey County, someone told Anderson that James Sandusky married Sarah Mary Frances Harding on January 14, 1867, and fizzled out like club soda. The search for their children continued. In the meantime, on June 18, 1878, James Sandusky married Nancy Ellen Hundley in her parents' home in Marion County, Kentucky.
The 1880 census of Knifley, in a remote corner of Casey County, now in Adair County, where James Sandusky was a blacksmith, turned up five children, four of whom he had with Sarah Harding and one with Nancy Ellen Hundley. The first one, born in December of 1867 and named Jonathan R., was changed by 1900 to McLellan, incorrectly spelling the name of General George B. McClellan, the Democratic candidate for president in 1864. If that wasn't enough, it was shortened to McLand Sandusky on January 22, 1891, when he married Susan J. Tucker The other children were Parsilla, James T. (born September 1872), and Susan M., all by the first wife, and John Woodford Sandusky by the second wife. The war veteran died at Knifley, June 22, 1912, and was buried in Clementsville on Route 551 northeast of Knifley. Unknown to me, the two wives and a lot of their descendants might lie in unmarked graves at Clementsville.
Exactly when John Woodford Sandusky and Betty Hume/Humes were married and moved to the village of Curtis, on the South Fork of the Little Barren River, in Metcalfe County, Kentucky, are unknown. After the death of James Sandusky, Nancy Sandusky moved to Curtis, where she died December 4, 1912, and it marked the end of a generation.
From: Edward Pinkowski (2008)