Hat on Top, Coat Below
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Private Leander W.
December 5, 2012
I ate lunch at my desk today, as I do most days. When I go out, I tend to be entirely too tempted to eat and/or buy things I don’t need. Not that I don’t face similar challenges while staying in the building—there are five candy jars between my desk and the printer, for instance, but lately I’ve been doing a good job of pretending they’re not there. So I ate and then fell down an internet rabbit hole. I’d gotten an e-mail from Find a Grave with some biographical information that another member was requesting I add to one of the memorials I manage on the site, for a headstone I’d documented on a trip to Illinois several years back. I made the changes to the page and then followed the link which the other member had included in his request, which led me to a transcript of a newspaper article about the death of the young man in question. I’d known from the headstone I’d photographed that he was not yet 20 when he died, and based on the year of death, 1863, I wasn’t surprised to learn that he served in the Civil War. As it turned out, he died not from a wound, but from consumption, on his way home 11 days after being discharged for ill health. Very sad. The newspaper article mentioned that he was traveling with his brother, Richard, who’d also been discharged. I was strangely thrilled to find that his brother had a memorial page on Find a Grave, too—he died in 1918 in California, which made me curious, so I searched and found he’d worked on the family farm in Minnesota after the war, married a local woman and had two children, later married another woman, moved to Colorado then Washington state and finally California, where he died in the Pacific Branch of the US Soldiers Home. There’d been mention of a sister in the first newspaper article, but no name for her. That wasn’t much to go on, but I did find that there were between ten and twelve children in the family all together, two or possibly three of them girls (sources vary). ). I found the father’s memorial page and some other information; he was born in New York state and ended up in Nebraska, dying in 1878. It feels like I now know more about this family than I do my own, even though I had to stop poking around and get back to work after sending a couple of requests of my own to get memorial pages updated with things I’d found.
On this date in 2009 through 2011: No entry.
2008: It’s Holidailies Time
2007: No entry.
2006: I Used to Crochet
2005: Winter Count – January
2004: No entry.
2003: Quilt List
2002: Forgotten Tradition
