Some family history In 1864, at the age of 40, my 3 rd great-grandfather, Robert Ehart, died and was buried at Sweet Springs, Missouri. According to my family’s oral history, he was a Confederate army veteran, and my Grandfather told me he was killed late in the Civil War. His son, John Riley Ehart, born in 1862, traveled by covered wagon with his mother, Mary, to Texas, where they settled. When he reached adulthood, he and his spouse settled in Weed, New Mexico. According to the 1900 US Census, his profession was stock herder, which fits the family’s oral history, but it says that their house was rented. This is interesting because my grandparents lived there, and they had a painting of the house labeled “The Homestead,” and they always referred to it as such. While a 1925 article in the Alamogordo News mentions John as a witness in the finalization of a neighbor’s homestead, I could not find anything to support this claim. Still, homestead records are difficult to access, and it
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In the early days of the American Republic, there was great debate over the revolutionary basis of the authority of the Constitution. The founding fathers had made it clear that the oath was not to God, princes or kings, or even the nation, but to the document that established the United States of America, the Constitution. This document was perhaps the ultimate expression of the Enlightenment. Not only did it place the source of authority as the people, but it also maintained that no religious test would be applied and that no one religion would be the official faith of the United States. To a people who could see the religious wars of Europe, and from which many had fled, it was important to remove the causes of many of the wars and civil wars of the preceding centuries. By declaring that there would be no religious test for the new country, the founding fathers made it clear that whoever and whatever you worshipped, the important thing was that you declared your al