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William Yates Gholson.
First Lieutenant 106th Ohio Vols. (Infantry), July 16, 1862; Captain, July 24, 1862; killed at Hartsville, Tenn., December 7, 1862.William Yates Gholson, Jr., was born, March 11, 1842, in Pontotoc, a small town in the northern part of Mississippi. His father was a native of Virginia and a graduate of Princeton, whose first wife, a daughter of Chancellor Taylor of Virginia, had left him two children, —Samuel Creed Gholson, subsequently a physician in Mississippi, and Ann Jane Gholson, who married Mr. Glasgow, one of the proprietors of the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond. Removing to Mississippi in 1835, Mr. Gholson there married Miss Elvira Wright, the mother of the subject of this biography. In 1845, for private reasons, he relinquished his flourishing law practice and removed to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he became at one time city solicitor, and in 1855 was elected Judge of the Superior Court. This office he held till 1860, when he was elected Judge of the Supreme Court of Ohio, on the Republican ticket. Since that date he has resigned his seat on the bench, and resumed the profession of an advocate. ‘The Gholsons,’ wrote William, in 1861,
were originally of Saxon descent. . . . . The name is a very rare one, borne, I think, only by our own family. My father has examined a great many lists of English names, and found in one gazetteer the name Gholston. The Pretender at one time assumed the name of Gholston. Before the Revolutionary War the Gholsons were settled in Orange County, Virginia, at the residence lately occupied by Philip P. Barbour. One of the sons, Thomas, my great grandfather, moved to Brunswick County, near the Meherrin River, and gave the name to a town there, Gholsonville. His third son, Thomas Gholson, Jr., my immediate ancestor, was born in 1780, married Miss Ann Yates, was a member of Congress from 1807 until his death, July 4, 1816, leaving three children, of whom my father was the eldest. Daniel Wright, my great-grandfather, on the mother's side, lived in Virginia.
