10 September 2023
In the spring of 1608 Nathaniel Causey, soldier in the band of John Smith, arrived from England at the Jamestown Colony in the new world of Virginia. His wife Thomasine arrived in 1609. They adapted to the wild new environment and in 1620 received a grant of 200 acres of pristine land north of the James River which he named Causey’s Cleare. Evidence recovered from Causey’s Cleare supports the belief that he was not only an “old soldier” but possibly Captain Smith’s gunsmith, maybe the first in the colonies. Nathaniel and Thomasine and their sons Thomas and John survived the “Starving Time” and the Native attacks of the early 1620s. They continued several years there before their return to England leaving Thomas and John there in Virginia.
In 1634, John Causey sold Causey’s Cleare and probably headed north eventually landing in Maryland in what became the county of Dorchester. It is from the Causey stock of that county most Americans of the Causey surname descend. My family line, descended from Thomas Causey, (c.1690-1776), migrated to North Carolina; then across to Tennessee; landing in Alabama.
My second Great Grandfather James Solomon Causey, My Great Grandfather James Orlando Causey, and My Grandfather John Solomon Causey all lived in and around Fayette County, Alabama where I was born.
My father Clifton Tilford Causey, having served in World War II in the South Pacific Theater, returned home to a much more mobile society. He and all my uncles left the agrarian society into which they were born and raised for the industrialized mid-west, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. But my father missed his roots in Alabama where he returned to work the coal mines. These primitive mines were deadly. If you survived the cave-ins, you were pretty much doomed to an early death from “Black Lung” or cancer. The combination took my dad at age 40 in 1963.
I was 16 and restless. I was hurt and angry at the loss of my father. In outright rebellion I was expelled from school before ending grade 11. My mother was hurt deeply for which I will always be sorry. I left home and moved to Moline, Illinois where I had aunts and uncles who cared for me as best they could. I worked at a grocery store then a Hudson car dealership at what we now call “detailing” their automobile inventory. Just after my 18th birthday I was able to get a job with John Deere Plow works. At first I operated a fork lift but soon was transferred to John Deere Harvester Works in East Moline where I became a spot welder.
In the hot July of 1965 I happened to be passing the post office in Rock Island, Illinois, (part of the “Tri-Cites: Rock Island, Moline, and Davenport, Iowa), when I was taken by the “I need You” for US Army placard. So, I enlisted in the Army and was sworn in at the LaSalle Street Station in Chicago. From there I was provided a train ride to Fort Knox, Kentucky for Basic Training. What followed was Field Artillery training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, then Basic Airborne school in 46 Company, Fort Benning, Georgia and onward to the great 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. By December 1966 I was in Vietnam.
I may continue this story later. But I want to wrap this blog up 57 years later. I’m now a retired soldier and a retired teacher living with my precious wife of 50 years in the foothills of the Huachuca Mountains in Southeast Arizona. In two months I will be 77 years old. Our youngest has retired from the US Army and living about 15 miles north of the home of my 8th Great Grandfather, Causeys Clear near Charles City, Virginia. I wonder what Granpa Nathaniel Causey would think of the Causey line coming FULL CIRCLE. wrc
Leave a Reply