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...Robert Davis
Hardin, the son of James Allen Hardin, was born in Johnson County, Missouri, in
the year 1845 and came west with his father in 1849, when he was 4 years old.
We have no information about him from the age of 4 until he reached the age of
19 when he enlisted in the 2nd Infantry of California Volunteers, at
Sacramento, California, in the year 1864. He was honorably discharged in the
year 1866. At the time of enlistment he resided at Petaluma, California.
In
1869, he was married to Annie Kirkwood at San Jose, California, by a Justice of
the Peace.
Six year later he was living with his wife in Virginia City,
Nevada, and after the fire of 1875 moved to Modoc County and took up a
homestead and preexemption claim there. His pension record from the National
Archives, in Washington D. C. indicates that a daughter by the name of Annie
Eleanor Hardin, (the present Mrs. Estabrook, now living at Alameda, California)
was born in Modoc County, in the year 1878. The record does not inidicate the
month or day of this birth. The information in your letter to me shows that her
father, Robert Davis Hardin, appears in the Modoc County Great Register of
Voters for 1880, residing at Pitt River.
The next information that we know
is that his daughter was attending the Cole Grammer School, at 4th and Grove
Streets, Oakland , California. During this period he lived with his wife and
daughter at Oakland, California. Subsequently he and his separated. His wife
passed away in the year 1908 and is buried in the Evergreen Cemetery, at
Oakland, California.
For years no knowledge of his whereabouts was known
until this year his daughter decided, with my assistance, to find out what
became of him. The first move we made was to contact the Old Soldiers Home, at
Yountville, California. Here the record indicated that he was there from 1904
to 1905, and then left.
I then wrote to the Pension Bureau, at Washington,
D. C. and in a few weeks I received photostatic copies of his pension records.
These records indicated that in the year 1917 he was living in the town of
Herndon, about 10 miles north of Fresno, California. They further indicated
that he died on June 30th, 1917, but they did not state where.
I then wrote
to the Bureau of Vital Statistics, at Sacramento, California, for his
Certificate of Death, and in due course received it in the mail. This
certificate indicated that he died at the Fresno County Hospital, at the age of
72. It indicated that he was buried in the Mt. View Cemetery, Fresno,
California. Stephens and Bean were the undertakers. The date of burial was
given as July 5th, 1917.
On November 7th, 1953, we visited the Mt. View
Cemetery, at Fresno, California. Our object was to locate the grave of Robert
Davis Hardin. The Cemetery records indicated that he was buried there in the
year 1917, in "Block No. 2" of the G.A.R. section. We were told that there was
no marker on his grave and they did not have a chart to indicate just where he
was buried.
Thus, ends the history of a Civil War Veteran, Robert Davis
Hardin. |
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