An East Tennessee mystery involving two names, two families, and a young man who seems to have gone to considerable trouble to keep his descendants guessing his identity.
Some ancestors leave us photographs, birth certificates, and family Bible records. Others leave us a mystery, apparently convinced that future generations could use a good detective story. Troy F. Collins may be one of our finest examples.
Born about 1834, reportedly in Rhea County, Tennessee, Troy eventually made his home among the hills and valleys of southeastern Tennessee, where the Collins and Bunch families had been crossing paths for generations.
But Troy is an unusually elusive fellow. For a man who married, raised a family, served in the Civil War, and died in a military hospital, he left remarkably little behind to tell us who he really was. No known photograph has surfaced to show us his face. No personal letters or cencus entries have yet emerged to tell us about his childhood. And before his marriage in 1855, the historical record seems strangely reluctant to acknowledge his existence at all.
We know quite a bit about how Troy’s life ended. Discovering how it began has proven considerably more difficult. And that is where our story gets interesting.
A Boy Named Leroy
Turn back the clock to 1850.
In McMinn County, Tennessee, a fourteen-year-old boy named Leroy Collins was living in the household of Lambert Bunch. Lambert happened to be the uncle of a pretty young girl named Mariah Jane Bunch. Who at eleven-years-old was living next door in the household of her father, Joseph Bunch.
Five years later, on April 17, 1855, a young man named Troy Collins married Mariah Jane Bunch in Meigs County, Tennessee. Nothing particularly mysterious about a marriage. Every day, young people meet, fall in love, and begin families. But rarely, does the groom just emerge from nowhere.
Yet, so far, our research has not uncovered an earlier record identifying any Collins boy or man by the name Troy. Leroy, meanwhile, is right there in the 1850 census, living with the family of Troy’s future bride. Coincidence? Perhaps. But genealogists know that coincidences involving names, ages, locations, and family relationships deserve a very close second look.
Did Leroy somehow become Troy, or are these two gentlemen simply having a good laugh at our expense? Perhaps Troy’s full name included both names. Or perhaps we’re dealing with two entirely different young men whose lives happened to intersect with the same family.
Following the Bunches
The Bunch family may hold the key to discovering Troy’s origins.
Long before Troy and Mariah exchanged marriage vows, the Bunch and Collins families were part of the great movement of settlers through the Virginia and North Carolina backcountry into East Tennessee.
Our research has taken us along the New River, into the Clinch River settlements, and through the frontier communities surrounding Fort Blackmore. These were places where families traveled together, married into neighboring households, and maintained connections across generations.
And that brings us back to Lambert Bunch. Why was fourteen-year-old Leroy Collins living in Lambert’s household in 1850? Was he a relative? An orphan? A farmhand? Or had circumstances in his own family brought him to Lambert’s doorstep?
For one fleeting moment in 1850, Leroy steps out of the shadows and into the historical record. Then, just when we begin to reach for the questions, he slips away again. Sometimes a census entry closes more doors than it opens.
A Few Clues, but No Portrait
By 1860, Troy Collins was married to Mariah, raising a family, and living in McMinn County.
Before long, the peaceful hills of East Tennessee would echo with the sounds of war, and Troy would exchange his carpenter’s tools for a Union soldier’s rifle. Ironically, it was the war that provided some of our clearest glimpses of this otherwise shadowy figure.
An 1863 Confederate conscription notice describes Troy as approximately five feet eleven inches tall, with black hair, black eyes, and a dark complexion. His Union military records tell us about his service, his movements, and the serious wound that eventually led to his death in Nashville on November 28, 1864.
It’s like reading the ending of a book and discovering that its first several chapters are missing.
The pages that remain tell a remarkable story. We meet a man nearly six feet tall, with black hair and dark eyes. We follow him from the hills of East Tennessee into the turmoil of the Civil War, through military camps and onto the battlefields of Georgia. We learn of a terrible wound, a hospital in Nashville, and a life cut short at about thirty years of age.
The final chapters of Troy’s life are written in military records, hospital registers, and newspaper notices. The opening chapters, however, seem to have been misplaced somewhere along the winding roads of early East Tennessee.
The Mystery Continues
Who were Troy’s parents? Where did he spend his childhood? And what became of young Leroy Collins, who seems to vanish from the records just as Troy makes his first appearance in the 1855 marriage register? Did one young man simply step out of history under one name and reappear under another? Or has coincidence led us down a particularly intriguing rabbit hole?
We have followed the Collins and Bunch families across state lines, examined their marriages and migration patterns, and explored the possibility that Troy’s origins lie among the earlier Collins families of the Appalachian frontier.
The deeper we venture into the rabbit hole, the more mysterious its passageways become. Somewhere among the twists, turns, and dead ends, perhaps the missing chapters of Troy’s story are waiting to be discovered.
Somewhere in an old courthouse record, a forgotten family Bible, or a document tucked away in someone’s collection, there may be a clue that finally connects Leroy to Troy—or sends us off in an entirely different direction.
And perhaps, somewhere, there is even a photograph waiting to be discovered.
Our search for Troy F. Collins continues through the records of the Collins and Bunch families, the frontier communities of early East Tennessee, and the surviving documents of the Civil War.
Perhaps you hold a missing piece of this intriguing puzzle! If you have photographs, family documents, letters, stories, or even a hunch that might help us unravel Troy’s mysterious beginnings, we’d love to hear from you. After all, the next clue may be hiding in an old family album, a forgotten box of papers, or a story passed down through generations. Please contact us—we would be delighted to have a few more detectives join the search!
