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This incident did not occur to my immediate ancestor's family, but it did happen to their neighbor: the wife was raped repeatedly by yankees, after which she went 'insane' and killed herself. Another neighbor's farm was utterly destroyed, so much so that the mother starved to death in the ensuing months, and the children were taken in by neighbors.

I know that this was much more common than one would surmise, as the census data immediately thereafter (tax rolls and other documents) listed numerous children unrelated to the HoH living with them.

My ancestor's wife and three small children left the devastation and the state to middle Florida to escape the yankees and Reconstruction.

And yankees think that they were the epitome of nobility during the war and Reconstruction.

I’ve often wondered if that happened to any of my wife’s Georgia relatives. Her parents were pretty quiet about specifics of what happened.

Back in WBTS times, I think they sometimes referred to rape in veiled terms, perhaps to protect the ladies involved. If you’ll remember, I once posted about some women who were badly burned by Federal troops in Arkansas in an attempt to find where they might have hidden money and other valuables. One sentence in the report struck me as possibly indicating rape: “Notwithstanding these outrages [the burnings], that of still deeper infamy is now the suffering pangs at heart of some of the helpless ladies of Johnson.”

This incident did not occur to my immediate ancestor's family, but it did happen to their neighbor: the wife was raped repeatedly by yankees, after which she went 'insane' and killed herself. Another neighbor's farm was utterly destroyed, so much so that the mother starved to death in the ensuing months, and the children were taken in by neighbors

That's a sad and interesting story. I'm curious as to the general part of the world that it happened in. Was it South Georgia on Sherman's march? I know there were some terrible crimes brought about in Sherman's expedition, but the book I linked in post #106 shows that in some areas it was the rebels who were the criminals and the Yankees who were understandibly regarded as the liberators and allies. Had the Yankees made faster progress my kinsman would not have been murdered by the Confederates in the mountains of North Georgia.