Dead Men Tell Tales

Nottingham's burial grounds past and present are endlessly fascinating.

Today, I happened to walk past Christ Church Gardens, which is on Ilkeston Road, several hundred metres to the west of Canning Circus. I decided, on a whim, to go in and have a look around.

The church that was once here dated back to the 1840s. It closed during the Second World War, never reopened and was demolished in 1951. The gardens that remain are not unpleasant and the lowered south wall of the church has been left in situ. 

The churchyard was used for burials, and the remains probably still lie beneath the cleared ground.

Along the western perimeter wall are a number of memorial stones, including the one above, which immediately grabbed my attention. Its inscription begins:

IN LOVING MEMORY OF

GEORGE FLOYD

WHO WAS KILLED IN THE AMERICAN WAR

IN THE YEAR 1863

Several other individuals are then mentioned, including George's wife, Eliza, who died on 29 January 1882.

The American war referred to is the American Civil War, which lasted from 12 April 1861 to 26 May 1865. I know very little about the American Civil War.

A brief search on Ancestry later on led me to a US Civil War pension card for a George Floyd who served in the 39th New York Infantry. The card gives the widow's name as Eliza Floyd and also states that George had an alias - Alfred Perry.

With that knowledge in hand, it didn't take me long to discover that George Floyd of the 39th New York Infantry was buried under his alias Alfred Perry at Andersonville National Cemetery. The website that contained this information gave the date of George's death as 9 October 1864, which doesn't quite tally with the date on the headstone in England, but, crucially, it also mentioned that his wife Eliza received her pension in Nottingham.

Andersonville National Cemetery was originally associated with an adjacent Confederate prisoner-of-war camp that was established in 1864. 12,920 men died in the camp, and they were all buried in its cemetery, with the first burial taking place in February 1864.

George's tale surely deserves to be told. As indeed do those of all of the individuals whose names appear on the neglected memorial stones of Christ Church Gardens.

But now is not the time for me to vanish down that particular rabbit hole.