Civil War Veterans

Throughout my life, my family seems to have spent a lot of time in cemeteries. Mother & I mapped the 3 cemeteries in Bridgewater one summer when I was in grade school, measuring every headstone, foot stone, marker & tree. Father has been the reluctant head of the town cemetery association for years. I had the pleasure of being the low paid soul who ran a weed wacker around stones in Bridgewater, Mars Hill, and Easton. I will never put those little white crushed rocks around anyone's marker. They may look serene but they smart wickedly when flung through a weedwacker and launched at a high rate of speed into your shins or lower lip.

So, what does this discourse have to do with Civil War veterans? In a round about way, working in the cemetery may have gotten me into genealogy. After all, essentially, we're dealing with a fair conglomerate of deceased people. There are only so many things one can think about while zipping around thousands of stones for several years while dodging errant little white crushed rock. After getting over the fear of stepping down through a grave and giving up the notion that it was bad form, if not bad luck, to walk across someone's resting place, you get to reading the stones. Eventually, you bond with some of them - The couple who's pride of their 50+ year marriage is etched on their stone. The young women & infant children resting in the same grave with husbands joining them 30 years later; The twins boys named Vinal and Vynal buried next to one another days apart; Men whose honorable military stones pronounce perhaps the only valor they had in their lives and, in some cases, their ultimate sacrifice. Family markers and the unknown special stones you feel compassion toward often lead the unsuspecting cemetery worker to the game of "graveyard chess." A highly mental and physical game where you watch the other workers, gauge their stones per minute, and execute careful timing so that you are the one to do the rows with your family and the special stones allowing you to say a small hello and brush off the grass clippings before moving on.

I have had family bear to arms in a majority of conflicts that this nation has seen. The Revolutionary War saw most my people on the historically "wrong" side, there are Civil War veterans, WWI veterans, WWII veterans, Vietnam veterans and Gulf War veterans. (Though none in the Enduring Freedom campaign - it would appear that our family's youth took advantage of the prosperity and opportunity of the times and went to college instead.) The Revolutionary War and WWII probably were the most significant for my lineage. Yet in compiling names & dates & events, there were 2 Civil War veterans with battered copper markers holding crisp US flags over their remains. The more I thought of these 2 men, the more I wanted to know about their service. No longer were they g-g-g-g-grandfather Suitter or Hanning. They were men who experienced the Civil War. They were the men who marched miles on end through heat and mud and ice and blood. They were the men who made history. And they're related to me.

The resource that initally allowed me to look back and meet these 2 men was the National Archives. Both of these men applied to the US government to draw a pension for latent injuries sustained while in active duty for the Union forces. I ordered & received copies of their pension files. One was denied a pension, the other approved. Both contained information that is so interesting and, to me, truly gives an identify and a personality to my ancestors as well as to the community, the way of life, and the time they lived in. I would like to share with you some of that by giving a brief sketch of the person, the military unit he was in, and bits & pieces of the pension file affidavits and Government statements. I would also like to encourage you to take a look at your family and find the veterans & research what they actually did. They were proud enough of this country and their freedoms to offer the rare gift of their lives, we should be proud enough to remember them and take pride of what they did.