My grandmother Love Taylor's father, John Theophilus Thomas served in the Civil War in the Confederate army. While in Texas after the war, he met Hannah Celeste Stanley and fell in love. She was only fifteen years old, however, and her father insisted she not marry until she was sixteen. So John Theophilus waited. When she turned sixteen, in 1866, he took her back to East Tennessee, where they lived out their lives in the valley of the Holston, Sullivan County.