Her great-great-grandfather Basil Biggs was a free man, and census records show that he was married to Mary Jackson and still free in 1850, more than a decade before the Civil War. Basil was a veterinarian and moved his family from Maryland to Pennsylvania. Only five years after moving, Basil found himself in the middle of the Battle of Gettysburg. An obituary for Celia Biggs Penn (Basil’s daughter) notes that they were the only colored family in the area and fled the advancing Confederate troops. During the battle, Confederate soldiers turned Basil’s home into a field hospital, and when the family returned, their farm was in ruins and littered with rotting corpses.
Basil was contracted to remove the bodies from the field, and he and his 8-10 employees took on the unsavory task of exhuming Union soldiers from shallow graves and reinterring the bodies in the neatly ordered row that would become Gettysburg National Cemetery, the location of Abraham Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address.