This little book is a jewel in Pryor family research. It’s the kind of thing that could easily have been swept into the trash when long-ago clearing out a house. It’s also the kind of thing that many of us have tucked away and haven’t thought to share. This is a note book that Allen L. Pryor of Sumner County began to keep in about 1841. Thanks to a cousin I’ve met on Ancestry.com we have an important clue to our Pryors.
In Gallatin Cemetery there’s a cenotaph (not a tombstone, but a monument– no bodies buried there) to Sumner County soldiers who were killed Monterey during the battle of the Mexican War. The monument names Edward Pryor who Allen L’s family has long claimed to be one of Allen’s brothers. Without birth records nor even a Bible entry, we haven’t had much proof of their relationship.
The Battle of Monterey was fought in 1846 (five years after Allen L. Pryor began entries in this book. The monument can be viewed on Find A Grave, which states it was installed in Gallatin in 1850. There are some notable people buried in Gallatin City Cemetery.
I haven’t been able to find John Pryor, father of Allen L. and probably Edward on the 1820 Census. It’s interesting to know that in about 1850 the family believed he was born in Sumner County in 1823. That helps to place the family in Sumner County BEFORE the death of John’s father in law, Edmund Taylor, in 1824. It also puts John Pryor in TN about the time his probable brother William Pryor show up on the 1820 Census in Overton County– but still before his Taylor kin migrated to Tennessee after Edmund Taylor’s death.
Allen L. Pryor claimed on census records and in his Goodspeed biography to have been born 1816 in White County, TN. That’s even earlier than we can find this Pryor line in the paper records.
