What have I inspired?
Maybe I should second guess on what I post before it becomes part of the unofficial fanon?
Haha. Well, at least it's cool to see other people enjoy it and extrapolate it beyond what I wrote.
Anyway, here's some background to the whole "Who's Blackford's Dad?" idea I had:
I always thought that Blackford should have lived, along with a few other characters, if not at least a little bit longer. Even after reading his Turtledove wiki bio, I was disappointed that there wasn't much to describe Blackford's origins, other than he's purely a fictional character not based on anyone historical (besides an alternate version of Herbert Hoover). So, I decided to see if there was ever a Civil War soldier with the surname Blackford through the National Park Service website and found quite a few. 152 in total and 117 from the Union. The biggest number came from Ohio and none from the Dakota territory, which is where I was hoping to tie-in toward a real-life person (sort of like what I did with Featherston).
Since I only have names and not dates of death, I decided to have Hosea Blackford be descended by some real-life Blackford who may or may not have fathered a child before he left to fight in the Civil War. The question of paternity was included when I could only find
one or
two Blackfords who fought for the Confederacy and I thought to myself, "Hey, wouldn't it be very interesting to introduce reasonable doubt to his family history?"
I didn't think ahead that it could lead to some bizarre form of Birtherism in TL-191.
Oops.