southern blue
Sergeant
- Joined
- Oct 14, 2014
- Location
- Virginia
I have been trying to discover if my maternal grandfather's maternal grandfather (or any other relative on that side) served during the CW. The questions are over in the look up section but this morning when I was thinking about all this I remembered an odd moment with my grandfather.
He was a very active energetic man. He was either working or taking a long walk and the few times he did sit still he was reading. He climbed to the top of Clingman's Dome in the Great Smokies Mountains National Park when he was 85. Yes he was that kind of person. He always gave his opinion on anything but he rarely talked about his own family.
He stayed with us here in VA one summer and when he discovered we were fairly close to the Antietam battlefield he started insisting that he had to go there. We have lots of interesting CW related places around here to visit. We could have gone to D.C. or Gettysburg but no...he HAD to go to Antietam so we took him there. When we got there he HAD to go visit Burnside's Bridge. He walked out in the middle of it and stared down in the water for the longest time as if he was deep in thought which was odd because my grandfather was not a contemplative man. After a few moments he declared "That stream ran red with blood.' I was young at the time and assumed it was something he read in a book because after all he did read a lot. He never said anything more about it and I was too young to have the presence of mind to ask him any questions but the thing is I doubt he would have answered them if I had.
Years later I re-visited the battlefield with my own children. I walked out on the bridge and remembered that visit with my grandfather and I started to wonder about his out of character behavior and his insistence on going there meant that he might have known someone who was in the battle? My grandfather was born in 1888. Its possible. He was born in Tennessee, had family there but apparently also had family connections in Georgia and KY. He lived most of his life in Western NC. Then I began to wonder if perhaps it might have even been a family member. So of course that means I'm going to start digging around to see if I can come up with...something. That particular battle and that particular place must have meant something to him in particular.
And dang these relatives who won't share things!
He was a very active energetic man. He was either working or taking a long walk and the few times he did sit still he was reading. He climbed to the top of Clingman's Dome in the Great Smokies Mountains National Park when he was 85. Yes he was that kind of person. He always gave his opinion on anything but he rarely talked about his own family.
He stayed with us here in VA one summer and when he discovered we were fairly close to the Antietam battlefield he started insisting that he had to go there. We have lots of interesting CW related places around here to visit. We could have gone to D.C. or Gettysburg but no...he HAD to go to Antietam so we took him there. When we got there he HAD to go visit Burnside's Bridge. He walked out in the middle of it and stared down in the water for the longest time as if he was deep in thought which was odd because my grandfather was not a contemplative man. After a few moments he declared "That stream ran red with blood.' I was young at the time and assumed it was something he read in a book because after all he did read a lot. He never said anything more about it and I was too young to have the presence of mind to ask him any questions but the thing is I doubt he would have answered them if I had.
Years later I re-visited the battlefield with my own children. I walked out on the bridge and remembered that visit with my grandfather and I started to wonder about his out of character behavior and his insistence on going there meant that he might have known someone who was in the battle? My grandfather was born in 1888. Its possible. He was born in Tennessee, had family there but apparently also had family connections in Georgia and KY. He lived most of his life in Western NC. Then I began to wonder if perhaps it might have even been a family member. So of course that means I'm going to start digging around to see if I can come up with...something. That particular battle and that particular place must have meant something to him in particular.
And dang these relatives who won't share things!
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