Title: The Real War of our Civil War Ancestors: Stories of Johnny Reb and Billy Yank
S433, Saturday, 10 May 2014, 12:15 p.m.
“My Dear Wife,
Day before yesterday I dressed the wounds of 64 different men - some having two or three each. Yesterday I was at work from daylight till dark - today I am completely exhausted - but shall soon be able to go at it again… Yours as ever, W.C.” [William Child, Major and Surgeon with the 5thRegiment New Hampshire Volunteers September 22, 1862 (Battlefield Hospital near Sharpsburg)]
Johnny Reb and Billy Yank marched off to war, fresh-faced and young. Most of them paused to have a tin-type photograph taken to send to family back home. Their politics may have conflicted but their stories were often the same: young men fighting a difficult war, never to come home again.Through letters, diaries, journals, battle reports and reminiscences, Ken Nelson, AG, brings the stories of Civil War soldiers alive. A fiancé is asked to escort her beloved’s body home, a telegraph operator learns through the wire of his brother’s death, a mother grieves for her sons. First person accounts transform facts into stories of the challenges our ancestors, both on the front line and back home, faced in war.
Ken Nelson, AG will present The “Real War” of our Civil War Ancestors: Stories of Johnny Reb and Billy Yank during a Saturday luncheon (S433) sponsored by the Federation of Genealogical Societies. Sign up for the luncheon and learn how you can bring your Civil War Ancestors back to life through their own words or the words of fellow soldiers, neighbors and friends.
For more information about FGS go to http://www.fgs.org/.
[written by Marian Pierre-Louis, marianpl@fieldstonehistoricresearch.com]
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