John Warren Travis 13th MI Inf

[HarrisLightCoF]

So I joined CWT to get info on Howdy! Visiting Brandy Station this weekend']Brandy Station[/URL] to walk the path of a ancestor in NY's Harris Light Cavalry and see where he was captured. After a flurry of genealogical research I've slowed down, wading through 150 year old newspapers is tough work! Today on ancestry (which I joined at the same time as here) a fellow researcher (who I'll invite here!) has asked me about another ancestor who joined a Michigan unit but whose body was shipped back to his parents home in NY, even though his family (wife & kids) remained in MI. I haven't researched much about this fellow (although thanks to @JPK Huson 1863 & @ExNavyPilot and their pointing me to Fulton Post Cards I have mountains of saved reading to do!) and have no good answers.


So, since I'd like to respond (as I know how exciting it is to be chasing of a lead, and somewhat defeating when queries go unanswered) anyone have any idea how a hospital, rather than a battlefield, might deal with the dead, and how a family might retrieve & transport a body? From what I understand, he was dying from disease in Nashville, while his unit was busy arriving late to the Battle of Shiloh. Thanks!

 

[JPK Huson 1863]

Isn't Fulton Postcards crazy-good?? Just put in the date and the words- and wow! Doesn't always feed you those dates exactly but enough of them to spoil you for any other newspaper source. Incredible!

I'm not sure hospitals had the same methods across the board for the dead- it probably depended on which hospital, was it a field hospital or an established one? Some were mere stops on the way to one of the larger, ( hopefully cleaner ) better stocked and run hospitals in DC or some major city. Or a soldier's home.

I'm unsure on the poor men who died but because of disease they could not wait very long- relatives would have had to make contact somewhere if they wished an embalmer to help keep the body stabilized, or packed in ice for a trip to a home cemetery. Otherwise it was awfully important to bury the soldiers who didn't make it, who knows what reinterment
occurred and where from those places of burial?

If I have time, will look around the nurses' journals , see if there's some information there, otherwise hopefully someone here already has these answers.

 

[MRB1863]

Isn't Fulton Postcards crazy-good??

YES! Thanks for the reference! Went to the site to check it out...will spend some hours reading articles there! Some handy features and information. Have bookmarked, now. Thanks again JPK!

 

[Allie]

I don't have an answer for you but have often wondered the same thing. How were men's bodies handled? It seems like in all the cases anyone ever mentioned they were sort of shoveled into shallow and barely marked graves, yet somehow many of them ended up at home, with headstones. How did they get from one point to the other?

In my family I have a John Shadrach Rice who died at Brice's Crossroads at the age of 16. The diarist Dr. Samuel Agnew, who lived near the battlefield, describes John as being buried in front of his gate, and mentions a Rice family servant coming to his house for John's effects. Yet John is buried today in the Rice family plot in Durhamville with a clearly very old and worn marble stone. Was he disinterred at some point and transported?

 

[HarrisLightCoF]

I certainly wonder the same about my John @Allie, and although I've read through some local newspapers from the time, I haven't found a mention of him, so I don't really know if it was right after he died or sometime later. Certainly I've read about relatives searching for their loved ones, whether during or well after the war, and re interning or not, so lots of ways of doing it. I just wonder if he was away from his unit, who would've written who, and long did it all take. In the meantime, I imagine the hospital would've had to bury him for sanitary reasons. Well, tonight I'll hit the newspaper archives again and see what can be found

 

[HarrisLightCoF]

Ah, the power of the internets! Found William Pelletreau's 1886 "History of Putnam County, New York" which quotes from a 'local newspaper,' naturally doesn't say which one,

" June 14th. The remains of Daniel' W. Travis, son of Jeremiah Travis of Kent Avere brought home and interred in the Baptist burying ground at Red Mills. He was a member of the 13th Mich. Regt., to which state he went in 1954, and he died at Nashville, Tenn."

Since Jeremiah has no son Daniel, and I have an image of the gravestone to match everything else up, I'll assume the reporter flubbed the name (not uncommon now, not uncommon then) and so this at least tells me his actual body is there, and two months doesn't seem like an unreasonable amount of time to get a body from TN to NY considering communication & logistics, and even by 1862 I imagine people had more experience about transporting bodies long distance than they wanted...

Good luck @Allie, I hope you'll stumble upon a similar piece of good luck to fill in your the story about your John!

 

[ErnieMac]

Nashville was the main hub of Federal forces in the Western Theater from the time it was captured in February, 1862. Sick and wounded from any number of campaigns were brought to Nashville. Many were transported to Louisville and points north, but a substantial number stayed. Nashville held many as 25 hospitals of varying size during the war. Patients who died were handled in a variety of ways, but most were buried in local cemeteries. If the family had the wherewithal they could retrieve the body for home burial. The embalming process had been invented some time prior to the war and could be utilized if the soldier was wealthy or prominent enough. After the War the Federal government established the National Cemetery system to which many of the soldiers buried in the hospital graveyards or on battlefields were removed. Unfortunately poor marking and recording keeping resulted in the loss of the identities of many of these soldiers are they are buried under headstones engraved "Unknown".

 

[ErnieMac]

Relatives of men who died in hospitals were in a sense lucky because they had a reasonable chance of finding the remains of their relation. Battlefield deaths were a totally different situation. Those buried on the battlefield might only be found if their fellow soldiers had given the family a good physical description of the burial site or if a headboard identification was well enough constructed to remain intact until family arrived. Hundreds of family members would descend upon the battlefield for weeks afterward if it was accessible.

The following is an excerpt (pages 220 - 221) of George Freeman Noyes' book The Bivouac And The Battlefield: Or Campaign Sketches In Virginia And Maryland (1863). This account is written of his observations beginning on September 20 of the retrieval of the bodies of fallen soldiers by relatives after the battle.

"The van of that immense army of visitors, which for several weeks came pouring in to visit Antietam, had already arrived, and many citizens were now picking up relics of the battle, and exploring every part of the field. Hither came the father or the brother from New England searching for his dead; here, also, the distracted wife sought out the grave of her heroic husband. The Hagerstown turnpike for weeks saw every afternoon almost one continuous funeral procession, bearing away to the North the bruised bodies of the North's bravest sons. More than a thousand, perhaps, were thus carried home to sleep among their kindred, to repose beneath commemorative stones, to which all of their name and family shall point hereafter with natural and patriotic pride.

At first it had seemed to me better to permit our brave boys to rest undisturbed under the bullet-scarred trees, in the little glens, or out in the fields, where they died for the good cause, and where they had been laid to rest by their comrades; but when I saw the gratification with which their graves were discovered by relatives who had come hundreds of miles to claim their own, and the affectionate tenderness, not unmixed with pride, with which they lifted the beloved forms, shrouded only in uniforms of blue, into their coffins, and the evident relief with which they commenced their journey home, I had reason to change my mind."​