A Desertion?

George Beers' line can be traced to 1700, when Benjamin Taylor was born in Scotland. He had relocated to Cecil County, MD by the late 1720’s, where he married and fathered a number of children. His youngest son, born in 1744, was also named Benjamin and fought in a Maryland regiment during the Revolution.

The Patriot Benjamin’s son Edward (circa 1770) married Mary Ann Brown in Baltimore in 1792. There was a family tradition that Mary Ann’s father had been a Loyalist, but too cowardly to fight.

Edward and Mary Ann’s son Eleazer Taylor (1795) fought in a Maryland regiment during the War of 1812, and then moved to Huntingdon Co. Pa where he worked as a stonemason. He married a Pennsylvania woman named Nancy Rogers. The 1850 census recorded that she “cannot read or write”.

Their eldest daughter was Sarah, born in 1833. She married Reuben Beers in Franklin Township in August 1858, with moonlight glinting romantically off her father Eleazer’s musket.

This is where I should insert info concerning Reuben’s family, but no one knows anything about them. Likely-seeming Beers families lived in the area, but none of them claimed a “Reuben”. And he certainly didn’t claim any of them.

On 20 August 1862, Reuben Beer's (as he said he was) signed up as a Union soldier in Milesburg, PA. What happened next is a matter of considerable contention. His granddaughter Lena Beers Knox, a Mormon genealogist, claimed he died bravely in the assault on Petersburg, VA on 17 June 1864. No one else has found any record of this casualty.

All I’ve been able to find is a record of his desertion. There might have been a health emergency, or Reuben could have been a “bounty jumper” who took the enlistment bonus the government was offering and headed for the hills.

Sarah was about five months pregnant at the time of her marriage, and gave birth to little Martha on Christmas Day, 1858 in Riddlesburg, PA. Her son George Washington Beers followed on 22 May 1861. Less than a year and a half later, Reuben had vanished from her life. Or did he disappear even earlier? On a genealogical form prepared for me by Lena Beers Knox’s daughter Mary, there is a notation that “Reuben never saw his son”, implying he was off soldiering. But check the dates; he hadn’t yet enlisted. It looks like the couple was estranged before George was born.

Did Reuben gallantly die for his country in the 148^th Regiment, Pennsylvania Infantry, or did he merely flee everything he viewed as entrapment?