My paternal great-great-great grandfather, a 19-year-old Irish immigrant, had his thumb blown off in combat at the same Second Battle of Bull Run that claimed a teen-age soldier from New York. How far apart were they the day the unknown soldier, whose body was discovered in Manassas two years ago, was killed?
This week that teenage solder was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery as an unknown soldier from the Civil War. He joins two others found a few years ago. All were laid to rest with full military honors and marked with this Washington Post photo essay.
In the late 1970s, Dad and I went to the National Archives in Washington, to pull our ancestor’s service and pension record. It came to us in a 130-year-old satchel, a kind of file folder, that we unwrapped carefully, inspected and photocopied. I held the pension record signed with his X.
He was illiterate his entire life, a general laborer who followed my great-great-great grandmother, a skilled seamstress, in the cloth factories of Lynn and Lawrence, Massachusetts.
It’s a point of family pride, Dad told me, that it was my great-great-great grandmother who was not only the breadwinner but highly literate. The family lore said she was so skilled that as part of the deal for her to work when she moved on, her husband would get a job, too. I don’t know if that latter part is true, given what I know about those factories in the late 1800s.
We were at the National Archives that day on the request of my Aunt Ann, who was the family historian and who had written part of an academic book about Civil War medicine. Ann passed away in September. She would have been interested in this.
What is it that William Faulkner once wrote? “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so. But I’ll tell you that that bloody battle in 1862, the second on the spot in a year in the early Civil War, is a short drive from where my daughter, my sister and my stepfather live today.
I’m gratified that that unknown soldier got the burial, and the honors, he waited a century and a half to receive.
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