A Hempstead County, Arkansas farmer who went to the Confederate war at twenty-nine, came home, and did not survive the peace. He died in March 1867 at thirty-four, leaving a widow of thirty-two, five children — the youngest a baby — and a probate file. He is my third-great-grandfather, and until this week no page anywhere told his story.
The records of Abner D. Fowlkes are the records of an ordinary man in an extraordinary decade, and that is the point of writing him down.
He was born in Virginia in 1833, the son of Edward Bass Fowlkes, a planter who carried the family from Nottoway County, Virginia to southwestern Arkansas. I can say “the son of” without hedging because a court said it: when Edward’s estate was distributed, the Hempstead County Court of Probate, January Term 1854, listed Abner D. by name among “children and heirs of the said Edward B Faulkes decd” — parentage proven the way I like it best, by a clerk with no interest in genealogy. (The order names no mother; his mother’s identity rests on the tree’s ordinary evidence, and I keep the two grades separate.)
The censuses put him at Springhill, Hempstead County — seventeen and farming in 1850, twenty-seven and farming in 1860. In between, in October 1855, he married Josephine Derrick, of a family whose road ran from Philadelphia to Arkansas; their daughters carried her surname and her kin’s names as middle names for a generation. Children came steadily: Anna in 1856, Georgia in 1859, Emma in 1861, Estella in 1864, and a namesake son, Abner D. Jr., in 1866.
Look at those last three dates for a moment, because they bracket a war. In 1862, at twenty-nine, with a farm and three small daughters, he went into Confederate service — the National Archives holds carded service records for him, and a prisoner-of-war file in the War Department’s Commissary General of Prisoners records carries his name. I have not yet read the cards themselves, so I will not tell you his regiment or where he was taken; the index says captured, and the family’s dates say came home — Estella born in 1864, the baby in 1866. A man who was a prisoner of the United States and then a father again within the peace.
He had less than a year of it. Abner D. Fowlkes died on the 18th of March, 1867, at thirty-four. No record I hold names the cause, and I won’t guess — the postwar South killed young men with fevers, wounds that never healed, and plain exhaustion, and the record is silent on which of these it was. What the record does hold is what came next: on the 20th of May, 1867, the Hempstead County court opened the probate of his estate. Josephine was thirty-two, with five children between eleven and one. She lived another thirty-four years.
One of those five children is why this page exists. Georgia Derrick Fowlkes was eight years old when her father died. In 1880 she married a young man newly arrived in Texarkana from Essex County, Virginia — Thomas Lewis Latané Temple — and their son built the East Texas timber life the family name is still attached to. Every Temple of my line descends from the little girl in the Springhill farmhouse, and through her from the farmer who came home from the war and had one year.
How the line runs down to me
- Abner D. Fowlkes (1833–1867) of Springhill, Hempstead County, Arkansas, married Josephine Derrick (1834–1901) in 1855
- Their daughter Georgia Derrick Fowlkes (1859–1900) married Thomas Lewis Latané Temple (1859–1935) in 1880
- Their son Thomas Lewis Latané Temple (1887–1947) of Diboll; his son Thomas Lewis Latané Temple (1914–1997), my grandfather
- Abner is my third-great-grandfather
On the record, the open edges: his birth date is census-class, not record-verified; his regiment and the prisoner-of-war card are indexed but unread — the two documents I most want to open next; and the 1867 probate file itself, which may hold an inventory of the farm, is on the list. Above Edward Bass Fowlkes the line is tree-only and I make no claims for it here. When any of these is read, I will amend this page — that is what these pages are for.
Abner Fowlkes’s own page in the family wing holds the records behind this story: owentemple.com/family/people/i104.html. The full working tree is on Ancestry — his profile there (sign-in required; Ancestry’s rule, not mine).
Sources
- Hempstead County, Arkansas, Court of Probate, January Term 1854 — distribution of the estate of Edward B. Faulkes [Fowlkes], Probate Records Vol. D–E, pp. 48–49 (read on the register image, 16 Aug 2026)
- 1850 U.S. Census, Springhill, Hempstead County, Arkansas — M432, roll 26, p. 270A; 1860 U.S. Census, same place — M653, roll 42, p. 794
- Arkansas County Marriages Index, 1837–1957 — Hempstead County, 16 Oct 1855
- U.S., Confederate Soldiers Compiled Service Records, 1861–1865 (NARA carded records) — three cards indexed
- Civil War Prisoner of War Records, 1861–1865 — Selected Records of the War Department Commissary General of Prisoners (indexed; card unread)
- Arkansas, U.S., Wills and Probate Records — Hempstead County Bonds, Inventories & Appraisements, 1826–1927 (probate opened 20 May 1867)