Nows and Forevers

Brief stop alongside the road in Sharpsburg, Maryland, on the edge of the Antietam National Battlefield, a place that matters in my family history.

It’s where my maternal great-great-great grandfather, Robert Roberts of West Pittston, Pennsylvania, saw his first combat of the Civil War on Sept. 17, 1862, as a member of the 81st Pennsylvania. The worst of the worst, too: The Sunken Road, where more than 5,600 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed across an 800-yard line in less than three hours.

I visited here in depth in 2005 with my father, but I haven’t been back since. Antietam is the country’s bloodiest day in military history for good reason: 22,270 killed or wounded in a single day’s battle in the Maryland mountains.

My great-great-great grandfather survived that, survived Gettysburg, went all the way to Cold Harbor in 1864 and then spent the rest of the war in a Confederate prison camp. He went back home and lived with his wife and kids til he was killed in a mine blast in 1878 age 42.

Robert Roberts is buried a few steps away from the graves of my mother, my grandparents and great-grandparents. I have been going to his grave, along with my other ancestors in West Pittston Cemetery, my whole life. No one alive when I was born remembered him nor his wife, Ann, who died in 1915.

But my great-aunt Jeannette, the family genealogist, told me his story many times.

And Roberts’ plot also holds Hattie (Harriet) Howell, my great-great aunt, who died at age 20 in 1907. She died suddenly, as one did in those days, of an internal ailment. The Howells were too poor for a grave so Ann Roberts let her be buried with her husband and, eventually, her.

Hattie’s death so profoundly impacted her older sister, my great grandmother, Helen (Howell) Jones that she named her daughter (my grandmother) after Hattie.

And my grandmother named her first child, my mom, after Hattie. And, just before my grandmother died.

The past matters, and my family’s journey went through this ground.