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- Feb 5, 2017
I found the following in Civil War Archives on FB. The whole subject was what is in the National Archives and they were discussing diaries. A person put in this comment and it really hit me hard on how much this soldier suffered after the war and the PTSD he must have suffered. And this is only one story that got recorded - there had to have been thousands that went unrecorded or unreported.
"My great-great-grandfather Sam Ewing was shot just outside and before the battle of atlanta. He took a minnie ball to the face and it lodged in his sinuses. The doctors weren't able to find it, and because of the lead, the wound never healed.
He spent 40 years trying to get that thing to heal. Over the years it became stinky and in the summer flies were attracted to his face, and people were physically repulsed by him to the point of being physically ill.
In his Civil War pension files, I found multiple letters from family talking about how this strong powerful good decent man was shunned in the summer at church and at parties and at cookouts because of the smell and the flies. Mind you, he fathered a family of six or seven all after the war. Most of those kids and his wife wrote letters that I found in his pension file discussing how traumatic his life was every single day because of that gunshot wound to the face that never healed.
In the early 1900s, he finally found a dentist who was able to find that minnie ball. With very little anesthesia, according to the records in that file, the dentist dug it out and the wound finally began to heal.
He carried that minnie ball in his pocket until the day he died."
"My great-great-grandfather Sam Ewing was shot just outside and before the battle of atlanta. He took a minnie ball to the face and it lodged in his sinuses. The doctors weren't able to find it, and because of the lead, the wound never healed.
He spent 40 years trying to get that thing to heal. Over the years it became stinky and in the summer flies were attracted to his face, and people were physically repulsed by him to the point of being physically ill.
In his Civil War pension files, I found multiple letters from family talking about how this strong powerful good decent man was shunned in the summer at church and at parties and at cookouts because of the smell and the flies. Mind you, he fathered a family of six or seven all after the war. Most of those kids and his wife wrote letters that I found in his pension file discussing how traumatic his life was every single day because of that gunshot wound to the face that never healed.
In the early 1900s, he finally found a dentist who was able to find that minnie ball. With very little anesthesia, according to the records in that file, the dentist dug it out and the wound finally began to heal.
He carried that minnie ball in his pocket until the day he died."
Bringing the