The Cundiffs of Bedford Virginia

This is where I merge my passions for genealogy with my mosaic art. When I retired from my full-time job in 2015 I took up both mosaics and family research pretty much full time. I learned a lot about both sides of my family and made a lot of connections with distant cousins all over the US and in England and Germany.

The most interesting story for me was the Cundiff family origins in Virginia. I summarized below what I learned, and there was a lot more. When I planned to visit Bedford, VA, in spring of 2020 to do some in-person research, I googled to see if there was a mosaic community- and I found the Blue Ridge Mosaic Artists. The pandemic hit soon after that, and we rescheduled our trip for this fall. The BRMA coordinator contacted me to see if I wanted to exhibit in their invitational exhibit in October. I jumped at that, and began planning how I could make a mosaic reflecting my family’s heritage in that community.

The result of that is a mosaic “mapscape” ( I made that term up, I think) reflecting what I learned doing genealogical research about my father’s paternal family. The stories we heard was that his family had Welsh origins, he had an ancestor who fought and died in the Revolutionary war and that there was a monument with his name on it. Since I was raised in the Northeast, and knowing that his father was from Vermont, I had never put together that his family were slaveholders in Virginia until I did this research.

 I also learned Jonathan T. Cundiff actually was killed by Indians while fighting along with the British in 1774. There was possibly some Welsh DNA at one point in history, but the 17th century Cundiffs lived near Bath, England (which does border Wales).

 With the help of the Bedford Genealogical Museum’s resources, I was also able to learn much more, including the approximate location of their lands in Bedford County.  In 1771 Jonathan Cundiff bought “400 acres on both sides of Stony Fork Creek”. The Cundiffs were small scale farmers who raised corn and tobacco.

 I was excited to learn the names and a bit of the history of their enslaved people.  In this mosaic I wanted to acknowledge them by including a cemetery with their names on headstones.

 Zebedee was the first one I found since it was documented he was leased to the Confederate army to build fortifications in 1864. An 1837 deed listed seven family slaves: Zeb, Sam and Eliza were listed as children, Anice and Jack (Shrewsberry) were Zeb’s parents, and Himan and Madison were the other adults. Zeb’s wife was Amanda, and in 1870 they and Sam and Eliza Jordan lived close by Chesley Cundiff who had been their owner.

 The photographs are of Chesley’s son, my great-grandfather Samuel, who was a Confederate Army veteran and POW. He was a farmer with epilepsy, and he died in Bedford from a “stomach hemorrhage” at age 44 in 1890. His widowed wife, Mary Price Hatcher moved to Vermont in 1891 with their three children, her sister and her niece. They raised the children (my grandfather) in Brattleboro, then in 1908 she moved to Roanoke with her daughter Mary, and she died in 1920. The only other thing I really know about her was that she played the banjo.

Medium: Mexican and Italian Smalti, strata glass, red dog stone, slate, Apoxie Sculpt, Gilders Paste Wax, polymer clay photo transfer, 19th century chain fragment.