Soldier Found in 2011 at Wilson's Creek to Be Laid to Rest Oct. 17, 2015

Would love to hear a follow-up on any research into this man's identity. Would be incredible to identify him - I know a HUGE undertaking but would think it could be narrowed down into a few (ok - maybe not a few!) possibilities. Just the thought that this man was someone's son, brother, husband, makes me want him to have a name. May he rest in peace.
 
This soldier will be reinterred and that's as it should be. It makes me wonder how many other unidentified or totally unknown graves are out there on battle sites. How many wash out of hillsides and creek banks that we don't hear about?
I'm only musing. I doubt we'll never know the answer, but I expect there are many such lost graves around battle sites.
 
This soldier will be reinterred and that's as it should be. It makes me wonder how many other unidentified or totally unknown graves are out there on battle sites. How many wash out of hillsides and creek banks that we don't hear about?
I'm only musing. I doubt we'll never know the answer, but I expect there are many such lost graves around battle sites.
Patrick you are so right there. This photo I took in June at the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey where in WW1 thousands of Australians, New Zealanders, Turks and many others lost their lives in 1915. Many buried there, many never found. In 1985 flooding rains exposed hundreds of what were thought to be Australian and Turkish bones. They could not be identified and were buried together here in this tomb with suitable reverence. Enemies together as enemies no more.
image.jpeg
 
Oh my. Thank you for bringing him here to remember, Loyalty of Dogs. Makes you wonder when his family stopped looking for him, wondering what happened to him. Maybe his name does exist in a battle report as buried on the field- also makes you hope it does and they did not suffer in this way.

And gosh. When does the separation happen, that someone, a whole human is relic, not a fallen soldier much less ancestor? Diane told us Native American remains exist in museums for Heaven's sake- little off topic but if someone sicced natural history folks on our early settlers' graveyards we'd be incredulous. Well, they'd go to jail.

Thanks for the reminder, so many, many soldiers do not come home Peter. Somehow Saturday's burial binds all these men together and should- bones who were men who once answered a call then vanished into Time.
 
Never a truer word spoken @JPK Huson 1863. My wife's great uncle blown apart at Pozieres in France in 1916 aged 18. His grieving mother wrote countless letters to find out what happened and where is he? Never found any trace of him.

She had 3 other sons there too.

Let's remember all the fallen when this poor chap is laid to rest on Saturday.
 
Never a truer word spoken @JPK Huson 1863. My wife's great uncle blown apart at Pozieres in France in 1916 aged 18. His grieving mother wrote countless letters to find out what happened and where is he? Never found any trace of him.

She had 3 other sons there too.

Let's remember all the fallen when this poor chap is laid to rest on Saturday.

I think that's another unhappy consequence - when there's nothing to bury because the destruction of that soldier was so thorough. Like the shadow people on the streets of Hiroshima. With my people, when that happens - usually washed downriver fishing! - we find something they used a lot and bury that.

I'm glad this soldier in the post was re-buried after being disturbed by a ghoul. More of that is happening, particularly with Confederate burials.
 
Oh my. Thank you for bringing him here to remember, Loyalty of Dogs. Makes you wonder when his family stopped looking for him, wondering what happened to him. Maybe his name does exist in a battle report as buried on the field- also makes you hope it does and they did not suffer in this way.

And gosh. When does the separation happen, that someone, a whole human is relic, not a fallen soldier much less ancestor? Diane told us Native American remains exist in museums for Heaven's sake- little off topic but if someone sicced natural history folks on our early settlers' graveyards we'd be incredulous. Well, they'd go to jail.

Thanks for the reminder, so many, many soldiers do not come home Peter. Somehow Saturday's burial binds all these men together and should- bones who were men who once answered a call then vanished into Time.

With the passage of time, we somehow lose our sense of our common humanity with the dead whose names are unknown. Once we have lost that, it is all too easy to regard their remains as objects instead of people. There is a lengthy passage in historian William Frassanito’s groundbreaking photographic study, “Gettysburg: A Journey In Time,” that speaks to this. It is in his discussion of a particular photo of an individual dead soldier. I would encourage anyone with an interest in the Civil War to read his comments on pages 216-18. Here is a brief excerpt:

“The young man seen here has undoubtedly been perceived countless times over the past century as a vague nonentity, a corpse more awesome and revolting than real. We may look upon this photograph with disgust and say to ourselves, “War is horrible.” But we quickly forget.

“Somewhere down in Georgia, at the very moment Gardner’s negative was being exposed, a family anxiously awaited news of this soldier’s fate, hoping he had survived yet another battle unscathed. For that family, the true horror of war would never be forgotten.”​

We must remember the soldier, all the soldiers, and their families too.
 
Whenever I'm visiting a Civil War cemetery, I take a considerable amount of time to just sit and be with those buried. I think about their families. The idea that I would lose a loved one like that is overwhelming. I feel like I owe them, their parents, and the rest of their families some of my time. Especially the unidentified soldiers.

If I'm by myself, I'll even chat a little bit with them. :redface: A couple of times, I sat under a tree and quietly knit. My heart swelled with emotion when I saw my husband, who really isn't that into it all, brush leaves and dirt off of a gravestone and straighten the Confederate flag someone had placed there. He gave no thought to politics. He only saw a person ~ someone's son/husband/father/brother.

It's nice to know people who don't think that's weird. :smile: Well, not TOO weird, anyway.
 
With the passage of time, we somehow lose our sense of our common humanity with the dead whose names are unknown. Once we have lost that, it is all too easy to regard their remains as objects instead of people. There is a lengthy passage in historian William Frassanito’s groundbreaking photographic study, “Gettysburg: A Journey In Time,” that speaks to this. It is in his discussion of a particular photo of an individual dead soldier. I would encourage anyone with an interest in the Civil War to read his comments on pages 216-18. Here is a brief excerpt:

“The young man seen here has undoubtedly been perceived countless times over the past century as a vague nonentity, a corpse more awesome and revolting than real. We may look upon this photograph with disgust and say to ourselves, “War is horrible.” But we quickly forget.

“Somewhere down in Georgia, at the very moment Gardner’s negative was being exposed, a family anxiously awaited news of this soldier’s fate, hoping he had survived yet another battle unscathed. For that family, the true horror of war would never be forgotten.”​

We must remember the soldier, all the soldiers, and their families too.

Gosh. So good Loyalty of Dogs. It's true- bet not so much for members here but these images are used so, so frequently associated with the war the soldier has been lost- who he was, his name, his obit should it have been written, a photo in life, his parents and home- something he once said or the time when he was a boy and let all the chickens out. Bet if his identity were known we wouldn't be able to tolerate continually exposing him in this way.

Anyway, thanks for this remembrance for him and his loved ones, so poignant.
 
Whenever I'm visiting a Civil War cemetery, I take a considerable amount of time to just sit and be with those buried. I think about their families. The idea that I would lose a loved one like that is overwhelming. I feel like I owe them, their parents, and the rest of their families some of my time. Especially the unidentified soldiers.

If I'm by myself, I'll even chat a little bit with them. :redface: A couple of times, I sat under a tree and quietly knit. My heart swelled with emotion when I saw my husband, who really isn't that into it all, brush leaves and dirt off of a gravestone and straighten the Confederate flag someone had placed there. He gave no thought to politics. He only saw a person ~ someone's son/husband/father/brother.

It's nice to know people who don't think that's weird. :smile: Well, not TOO weird, anyway.

No, it's not weird at all; it's what separates us from the beasts. What is weird/sad is when your in that cemetery, and see all those stones, and something inside you is not stirred.
 
Oh my. Thank you for bringing him here to remember, Loyalty of Dogs. Makes you wonder when his family stopped looking for him, wondering what happened to him. Maybe his name does exist in a battle report as buried on the field- also makes you hope it does and they did not suffer in this way.

And gosh. When does the separation happen, that someone, a whole human is relic, not a fallen soldier much less ancestor? Diane told us Native American remains exist in museums for Heaven's sake- little off topic but if someone sicced natural history folks on our early settlers' graveyards we'd be incredulous. Well, they'd go to jail.

Thanks for the reminder, so many, many soldiers do not come home Peter. Somehow Saturday's burial binds all these men together and should- bones who were men who once answered a call then vanished into Time.

There are a few museums with the remains of early settlers and soldiers on display. For instance, the Smithsonian has (or had) displays of skeletons unearthed from Jamestown, explaining what archeologists can tell about who the person was and what happened to them. A medical museum in DC has skeletal remains of a few Civil War soldiers in display cases, for educational purposes as well.
 
There are a few museums with the remains of early settlers and soldiers on display. For instance, the Smithsonian has (or had) displays of skeletons unearthed from Jamestown, explaining what archeologists can tell about who the person was and what happened to them. A medical museum in DC has skeletal remains of a few Civil War soldiers in display cases, for educational purposes as well.


Holy heck, think I knew that- really wish the Smithsonian did not. There's an archeologist ready with reasons 'why' which will make my statement look silly - of course. Maybe it is. Maybe in the interests of science and the History I profess to love it really is necessary, disturbing graves- people consigned to eternity and the rest they devoutly believed was theirs. One, more profession I'd be terrible pursuing, couldn't do it. Uncover remains? They would be recovered with apologies. Stick behind glass for public viewing? When did one's ancestors become public property? And why?

If, during the moment of burial, when the little group stood praying around that deceased immigrant as he or she was lowered into the earth someone told them that a mere few hundred years in the future that person's bones would be displayed for anyone to see, they may have said ' No, we would not like that'. Those photos we were discussing in another thread, Victorians only reminder of their deceased loved ones, post-mortems? Private moments of grief now plastered all over the internet. Same thing. Sorry to sound like a crank, really do not mean to. It all just seems to intrusive and awful but for some reason we're expected it regard all these intrusions as normal.
 
Holy heck, think I knew that- really wish the Smithsonian did not. There's an archeologist ready with reasons 'why' which will make my statement look silly - of course. Maybe it is. Maybe in the interests of science and the History I profess to love it really is necessary, disturbing graves- people consigned to eternity and the rest they devoutly believed was theirs. One, more profession I'd be terrible pursuing, couldn't do it. Uncover remains? They would be recovered with apologies. Stick behind glass for public viewing? When did one's ancestors become public property? And why?

If, during the moment of burial, when the little group stood praying around that deceased immigrant as he or she was lowered into the earth someone told them that a mere few hundred years in the future that person's bones would be displayed for anyone to see, they may have said ' No, we would not like that'. Those photos we were discussing in another thread, Victorians only reminder of their deceased loved ones, post-mortems? Private moments of grief now plastered all over the internet. Same thing. Sorry to sound like a crank, really do not mean to. It all just seems to intrusive and awful but for some reason we're expected it regard all these intrusions as normal.

The Smithsonian still has bones of my ancestors - we're working to get them back. I do have major problems with this sort of thing. I feel for the Iceman over there in Switzerland or wherever he is! They've got him in a nice climate controlled compartment where people can come look at him... :x3: I don't know how many of them think of him as their grandpa but he is! After 20 years or more they finally decided Kennewick Man was an ancestor of the local yokel Indians - Colville people - which is what they said from the beginning. Well, we've got to study him and see where he really came from! What do you know - he's yours... Yes, we already knew that - want to give him back now? :cautious:
 
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