Verses in Ragtime

This is the story of the family, the WHOLE family, of the planter John Bucklin and his wife Ellen Boarman. John and Ellen had one son, Abraham. He married Lorena Willets and they had four children. Two older sons who died in Europe during the American Civil War. Lorena and her two daughters were stricken with a fever during the war. Lorena and her oldest girl, Ella, died. The younger daughter, Sissy, survived the fever but was never the same. She was what they called in those days, slow. It seemed not to matter.
Abraham also had a daughter with a slave, Cassie. There are no pictures of Cassie, but she is described several times in letters. She was fair. This is not surprising. The family had held slaves for over two hundred years at the time of her birth. By most reports, she came from a line of slave women who had worked in the Bucklin house and who bore the children of white men. Cassie was sent away from the Bucklin plantation before the war. Her daughter with Abraham, Eve, stayed on to tend to Lorena and her two daughters when the men in the family left for Europe at the start of the war. Eve took the name and position of the elder Bucklin daughter, Ella, upon her death. She nursed Sissy back to health and managed the plantation until the end of the war when the girls married two of members of the northern occupying force and moved to Pennsylvania to start their families.
Ella(Eve) was reunited with her mother who had been sold to a planter in Tennessee prior to the war. Though their husbands were never aware of Ella's lineage, Ella and Sissy maintained relationship their relationship with Cassie and the children she had after the war with a former Tennessee slave, Tom Kincaid.
This page will tell the story of the descendants of Abraham, Lorena and Cassie.

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