My Sublineage Moves Up in Rank

I just learned that the senior branch of my patrilineage went extinct a few months ago when the last male scion passed away at the age of 84. He left only daughters. My cadet lineage, descendants of William Christian Warnack (1807-1836), is now the only one that remains. There are two sublineages: that of James Singleton Warnack (1854-1923) who begat nine sons who all migrated to Los Angeles around 1910 and that of his younger brother William Mortimer Warnack (1858-1929), my ancestor and founder of the North Georgia branch of the family.

The nine sons of James, a bootmaker and farmer, did pretty well for themselves. Henry Christian Warnack was a journalist and screenwriter of silent films in old Hollywood. John Houston Warnack served in the Philippine Insurrection and also worked as a scenarist in Hollywood and a real estate agent. James Marshall Warnack was religion editor for the LA Times and wrote extensively about eastern religion. Two other sons were pharmacists. Two died young, and I don’t know anything about the remaining two.

My branch, on the other hand, was a lot less accomplished. William had four sons, all of whom were farmers. One died in his early twenties. Two sons, Jim and Claude, got into trouble in 1907 when they got into an altercation with an acquaintance, Chester Wilson, who ended up dead. The three men had been harvesting their corn, and Jim asked to use Chester’s team and wagon to carry his corn to his barn. Chester declined and remarked that it cost money to keep a team. Jim replied, “It don’t cost nothing to act a rascal.” Evidently, these were fighting words in Varnell, Georgia in 1907, as Chester came after Jim with a piece of lumber. Claude intervened by hitting Chester on the head with the brake stick from the wagon, and Chester died from his injuries a few days later. The coroner testified that Chester had “one of the thinnest skulls” he had ever seen.

Claude was tried and convicted of murder, but he was granted a new trial due to erroneous jury instructions about self defense and defense of another. There were two more trials and two more sets of erroneous jury instructions until the appellate court simply overturned the conviction. The case, State v Warnack, is occasionally cited as an unusual application of the law. Ordinarily, one who intervenes in defense of another steps into the shoes of the person he is defending, but State v Warnack is sometimes said to stand for the proposition that the intervenor’s belief is relevant. I was called on in law school to discuss the case inasmuch as my family was involved, but I didn’t know much about it at the time. I have since read the transcripts which I have shared with Claude’s descendants (who did not know about their ancestor’s infamous episode).

Claude’s older brother, Gus, my ancestor, was not involved in the scandal. Gus operated the telegraph for the Southern Railroad, farmed and kept a general store. He was an avid fox hunter and bred fox hounds. Fox hunting in Varnell was nothing like English fox hunting. In Varnell, you drove the dogs out to the woods in the evening, set them loose to hunt the fox, and started drinking while listening to the ruckus the dogs made. Gus was also a champion checker (or “draughts” as he called it) player and an enthusiastic gambler. He liked his whiskey and the ladies of the evening. I knew him as Papa Gus, but he was more widely know as Papa Toog for some reason lost to posterity.

As far as I know, none of Gus’s descendants has ever amounted to anything, although many of us have led happy boring lives and some of us have prospered.