Okie, I don't have much information on Bertha Dalton, at least not yet. Our Bloody Bill Anderson Mystery group member Bud Hardcastle is going to contact an older Dalton family member and see what that person knows. I believe that Ola Everhard's mother was named Bertha and Bertha's father's mother's maiden name was Dalton so that may indicate a family tie. Here is some of what Ola Everhard said about her family in
The Truth About Jesse James by Rudy Turilli (1967):
"MY EXPERIENCES WITH JESSE JAMES, ALIAS J. FRANK DALTON
by Ola M. Everhard
"I have always had a never-ending interest in people and, of happenings in by-gone days, particularly when they pertained to my kinfolks of course.
Being a cripple since birth, naturally a great deal of my growing up was indoors so I talked more with adults than with those my age. When mother and I were alone, I would ask questions then sit quietly by listening, as she told about her folks and her childhood, how every chance she got after her chores were done, she would get permission from her father to get his old family Bible out of his trunk and read it. It was not such a large Bible in size, but unusually thick. The leather backs were badly worn from years of handling and between those worn backs and thin yellowed pages, was the family record, which was quite large in length. Covering from my mother back through five generations that were all written in a beautiful Spencerian hand. Mother always loved to read that old Bible and from those records she learned a good bit about her father's people.
Mother's paternal grandfather, Henry Underwood, married Sarah (Sallie) Dalton. They had three children, James Anderson, Eliza Ann and a boy that died quite young. Nothing much, was recorded about Henry Underwood except his and Sarah's marriage and their children, but mother's father (James Anderson) told her that his father (Henry) joined Quantrill's Raiders that fought on the side of the Confederacy, went away during the War between the States and never returned, and, that after their home back in Tennessee was pillaged and burned during the war, his mother (Sarah) returned to some of her people and died not long afterwards. He did not say just which one of her people she and the children went to, or where. She had several sisters and a brother. (Mother was Bertha Underwood, daughter of James Anderson Underwood, who was the son of Henry and Sarah Dalton Underwood. Mother's married name is Bertha Underwood Maddox, second cousin to Jesse and Frank James, also to Charley and Robert Ford. She is now 82 years old, in 1965)..."
***
I would like one of the Dalton/James naysayers to just once explain how the older Dalton just happened to have a long scar on the left side of his face that identically matches the scar on the left side of young Jesse James' face. They always sidestep that and other solid evidence that I believe proves that the man known as J. Frank Dalton was Jesse Woodson James. I guess they rightly think that explaining that Dalton cut his face so that he could pass as Jesse James wouldn't convince anyone.
~Texas Jay
Home - William C. "Bloody Bill" Anderson - we have a lot of information about Dalton/James in our Photos section here.
