My brother, who was the executor of my father’s will, moved recently. He discovered two boxes that he thought contained only old financial records that could have been destroyed long ago during the move. Instead, he found old photo albums, letters, graduation, wedding and funeral announcements, and my Dad’scomplete military records.
I wrote the book Ninety Day Wonder with only partial, barely readable records, copied from what remained after the Army Personnel Records Center fire in 1973. Fortunately, the book is a novel and did not follow my Dad’s career exactly, and the insight will be useful in completing the other two books in the series.
Some of the items in the boxes go back even further, the oldest being my great, great grandfather’s pin identifying his unit in the civil war, seen below.
My great grandfather and three of my great-great-grandfathers fought in the civil war. They all fought for the Union, although other members of the family fought for the Confederacy. There is a family legend about one branch of the family in which one brother fought for the Union, one for the Confederacy, and one brother was a spy for both sides. When the spy was caught and tried in Indiana, he was sentenced to death. My great, great grandfather visited his brother in jail, lamenting that the brother would be hanged in the morning. His brother told him, “Don’t worry, they won’t hang a Mason in Indiana.” By the next morning, he was on his way to Canada. For that reason, my grandfather refused to join the Masons. He had a strong sense of right and wrong and believed that if someone had been tried and found guilty, they should hang for their crime.
I have not been able to verify or disprove that story. However, I believe the brothers were William, Levi, and Albert Simmons, on my grandfather’s mother’s side of the family.
Someone also told me that my great grandfather had been aide de camp for Sherman on his march to the sea. Upon checking the records, I found that he had enlisted at the age of 17, late in the war, and his unit guarded supply trains that provided supplies for the march to the sea. He served for about four months, riding trains between Arkansas and Tennessee, and Georgia. He lived until 1935, telling my father many stories of his war service, some of them apparently fictionalized, and was celebrated as the last civil war hero of northern Kansas when he died.
This is why I prefer to write historical fiction rather than biography or pure history. By writing historical fiction, I can research my ancestors, then create stories that put my character closer to the center of history, rather than riding shotgun on supply trains.
We did inherit volume 2 of my great grandfather’s copy of Harper’s Pictorial History of Great Rebellion, published in 1868. My father’s cousin inherited volume 1.
Stay tuned for more discoveries from the box.
