“One was killed during a cavalry skirmish in Tennessee in 1863”
Do you know what battle he was killed in? I live in east Tennessee and know quite a lot about the Civil War in this state.
His name was David Belcher, and he was a private in Company K of the 2nd Georgia Cavalry. He suffered a severe wound to the shoulder during the fight and was captured by the Union garrison when they recaptured the houses they'd abandoned to Forrest's troopers earlier in the fight. Taken to the field hospital at nearby Fort Donelson, David lingered for over a month before dying of an infection on March 10, 1863.
His cousin is my great-great-grandmother, who moved to Texas after the war and married a man who'd served with the 46th Texas Cavalry (McCord's Frontier Cavalry). All four of her brothers fought in the war, with one dying at Crampton's Gap, Maryland and another being captured at Cold Harbor and dying at the POW Camp in Elmira, New York. The two younger brothers didn't join the war until almost the end, thus missing most of the conflict. After the war, they headed to Texas with two of their cousins to find new homes for their families and ended up getting poisoned for the fifty dollars in gold they were carrying. Their cousins survived the poisoning, but they did not.