John David Swor was born around 1844 in Mississippi to Richard and Vashti Swor. His father was a farmer who owned $100 in 1850. The family lived in Rankin County, Mississippi, until the 1850s, when they moved to Sumpter, Texas. His father died sometime before 1860.

 

Swor enlisted in the Confederate army on March 15, 1862, and mustered in as a private in Ragsdale’s Texas Cavalry Battalion. He spent the winter of 1863-64 impressing African Americans to perform manual labor for the army. He remained devoted to the Confederate cause throughout the war. In December 1864, after learning that President Abraham Lincoln had been reelected, he wrote that he “fear[ed] that the war will continue for some time yet. But Be that as it may I for one will never agree to submit.”

 

Swor returned to Sumpter after the war, and he married Celestia E. Cook around 1866. Their daughter Evora was born around 1867. The couple may have separated and ultimately divorced soon afterward. The 1870 and 1880 censuses list Celestia and Evora living in the Cook family household without him. Swor was living in Bosque County, Texas, in the mid-1870s. In 1880, he was working as a farmer in Concordia Parish, Louisiana. He married Sallie Lorena Berry in Adams County, Mississippi, on November 20, 1881. They had at least two children: Floyd, born around 1885; and Herbert, born around 1902. They settled in Justice, Texas, in the early 1900s, and Swor died sometime after 1920.

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