Member Eldon Sanders has provided some information on the death of William L and Sarah Brantley of Arkansas and Kansas.  They were reportedly killed by "bushwhackers".   If anyone has information on this or would like to take up the project of verifying the story, please email Ken.  brantleyassoc@mindspring.com    We concur with Mr. Sanders, that the story has creditability. 

This is the recent correspondence from Mr. Sanders. 

 I have not been able to unequivocally establish that William R. and Sarah Brantley, my great grandparents, and the father of Lucinda Ellender (Brantley) Castleberry, Martha Canzada (Brantley) Earnest, Romulus Haywood Brantley, and others, were assassinated in the Kansas Territory, in 1863.  However, family lore is so persistent regarding this matter that I accept that as fact.  I was 27 years old when my grandfather, Romulus, died in 1950. From my early years (8 or 9 years of age), I spent a lot of time with him and in my thirteenth or fourteenth year had the opportunity to discuss the fact that he was an orphan with him.  His recollection was only that they had been killed by "bushwhackers" in Kansas, perhaps in the area of Fort Scott. That an older sister had been "raised" by a family in Denver, Colorado. That he and a younger family member (a sister), had been cared for by a military unit for a short time and, then, somehow they had been transported to an orphanage in Springfield, Illinois. At the age of 10 years, he had run away from the orphanage and was taken in by a family in Pawnee, Illinois. He stayed with that family until he married at 29 years of age. I also find that his older sister, Martha Canzada Earnest, stated in an interview with a reporter from the Casper Herald Tribune (in 1947) that her family had moved from Texas to Kansas and that her parents had been killed in Kansas.