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by James A. Christian (Author)
At the November 19, 1863, dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery, President Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous address, eulogizing the "honored dead" being interred there. Only half of the four thousand soldiers who would be interred in the cemetery would have names inscribed on their gravestones, the remainder being simply interred as unknowns.
Abraham Lincoln's Honored Dead at the Gettysburg National Cemetery presents capsulized profiles of the two thousand soldiers with preserved names on their gravestones.
The soldier profiles are organized by state and presented in the order, by row and space, that a visitor to the cemetery would encounter each next inscribed grave in walking along the row in the state plot. Each profile gives the soldier's birthdate or birth year; his birthplace, if recorded; his enlistment date and rank; his pre-enlistment residence and occupation, if documented; his promotions, detachments, and absences during his service; his record of capture or wounding in battle preceding Gettysburg; the date of his wounding at Gettysburg, along with any record of the wound care he received, this mainly being amputations; and his date of death.
Of singular importance, the inscribed names on the gravestones show hundreds of errors. The profiles cite each of these errors and report corrected names, as confirmed by the soldiers' military service files. A special addition in this second edition is an index of these corrected gravestone names, offering historical and genealogical researchers a quick reference to the hundreds of otherwise misidentified soldiers. This second edition also augments and updates much of the information in the book's first edition.
Profile focuses carried over in this edition include referencing the names and grave locations of the nine acknowledged Confederates who were mistakenly buried in this Union cemetery; the names and grave locations of the underaged enlistees who would be killed at Gettysburg before their eighteenth birthday, including the youngest of these minors documented killed before his fifteenth birthday; the true names of soldiers who today lie buried under aliases; and the names of soldiers' wives, children and widowed mothers, who made successful applications for U.S. Pension Office stipends, included with their ages as of the dates these applications were made. The identification of these soldiers' children by name, and with their ages as of 1863, is of particular value for genealogical researchers, as these children are the great-great-grandparents and distant ancestors of millions of Americans alive today. The profiles also include the serial numbers of each of these so-termed Widow's Certificates, allowing for full reviews of these pension documents on the Fold3.com website.
The author examined over 2,000 Civil War service files and over 700 U.S. Pension Office records in order to present the intimate detail in these soldier profiles. With these profiles, the book has sought to enable glances into the lives of these two thousand men sacrificed at the Battle of Gettysburg. The readers of this book honor the sacrifices of these men by learning of their lives. The book simultaneously rewards the reader by presenting an unparalleled snapshot of the men who fought the Civil War.
