HelPeR - BYU Idaho Special Collections and Family History

Ancesto Stories for the Soul
Of course I was on the lookout for the Wisconsin
monument and the marker for John’s unit. And
there they were! The Wisconsin monument was huge,
towering hundreds of feet high, and it listed all of
the soldiers in all of the units from that state who
fought there. John’s name was among them, listed
with Company A of the 14th Infantry Regiment.
I can recall, even now, the eerie feeling I had
as I looked at his name there among those of his
comrades. The quest that began at some low level
of interest nearly 30 years prior was now building
to a crescendo that caused me to feel excited, nervous,
and also filled with awe and respect. Seeing
his name there caused me to feel connected to that
historic place and time in a way I never thought
possible.
One half mile further on I found the marker that
represented his unit’s place in the Union line. It was
approximately here, in an assault on 22 May 1863,
that my great-granduncle was killed.
How it Ended (The Cemetery)
The National Cemetery is at the northern end of the
park on a high bluff overlooking the river, and at the
place where the park road leaves the Union lines and
doubles back to follow the Confederate positions. It is
a large, tiered plot of ground that covers 116 acres.
To appreciate the cemetery, one has to know some
of its history. It is the final resting place of some
17,000 Union soldiers. This is the largest number of
Union burials among all of the national cemeteries.
(The Confederate dead are buried in cemeteries in the
city itself, or removed to other locations closer to the
soldier’s homes.) The Cemetery was not established
and made available for burials until 1866, three years
after the action at Vicksburg. All during the Civil War,
hasty burials were made near the places where battles
were fought. At the end of the War, those soldiers
were re-interred at national cemeteries.
Most of the soldiers buried at Vicksburg came
from temporary burial sites in Arkansas, Louisiana,
and Mississippi. Record keeping was not at its best
during wartime and grave locations were often lost,
and compounding that, the identities of those whose
bodies were fortunate enough to be recovered were
also often lost. In the south during the campaign
for control of the Mississippi River there was even
a further compounding problem: the River would
periodically overflow its banks and wash the hastily
dug graves away. It was often simply unidentified
piles of bones that were collected and buried at the
national cemetery.
At Vicksburg, 75 percent of the dead are unidentified:
almost 13,000 graves. I was suddenly very
thankful for the twists of fate that caused John’s
grave to be among the known. Those that are unknown
are marked with small rectangular blocks
of stone while the graves of those whose name is
known have traditional tablet-like headstones. It is
tremendously sobering to look over the cemetery
and see so few headstones. I could only imagine the
anguish of the families of those fallen soldiers, families
who never had the closure brought by burying
their loved ones, or of even knowing for sure where
their graves were located.
But John was among the known dead. This was
probably due to the fact that he was killed at Vicksburg
itself, ground controlled by a Union victory,
and ground high above the river and thus protected
from it.
The rangers at the visitor’s center were helpful
in locating his grave. I had the number on the
54 © Ev e r t o n’s Ge n e a l o g i c a l He l p e r Ja n ua ry/Fe b r u a r y 2009