A lot of my family wasn’t here yet. Of the ones that were, one g-g-g grandfather was an army surgeon (eechhh!) and a g-g-g-g-g grandfather was a commanding officer in Sherman’s March to the Sea.
If anyone died in the war, family lore hasn’t preserved the fact.
No effect on my family at all. Not one ancestor was in America yet. Makes me tired of those that are still trying to re-fight it today with crazy claims the succession attempt wasn’t about keeping the institution of slavery alive.
The only one I know about was a maternal great great grandfather who was a musician and played with one of the bands that followed the regiments, playing for entertainment and at the battles. There is a surviving letter from him written when he was on his way home after the war. He had ended up somewhere up north and wrote about talking to a Yankee child on the road and being sad about the whole retched mess. My mother’s cousin has it and most of the genealogy research and I’m supposed to inherit all it eventually.
Like many above, we weren’t directly affected at all – my ancestors hadn’t come over yet. So we were only affected by the effects the civil War had on the country decades afterwards.
Three of my four grandparents were born outside the U.S., and immigrated in the early 20th century. Never heard of any tales of ancestors of the fourth grandparent being involved in the Civil War.
Any idea which unit? I’ve a GGGG Grandpappy in the 39 Iowa INF. Maybe they waved at each other.
Long term, not much. I had a greatsomething uncle (not an ancestor, he never had the chance) who served with the Union forces that chased Morgan’s Raiders in Ohio, and later took a rebel ball at Knoxville. No doubt his death was as much a tragedy for his immediate family as any other soldier’s was, but the stories did not survive to the present, only his diary (which isn’t all that interesting, frankly).
I’ve found through genealogical research (but through no extant family lore) that several of my direct ancestors other male relatives fought in the civil war. My mother’s mother’s mother’s father’s father died of pneumonia just three months after joining the South Carolina 16th Infantry Regiment. My mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s father was around 1 year old at the time and had two siblings, so I’m sure that sucked for all of them. (My mother’s mother’s father’s father’s father also served in the same regiment, and survived. As did a few other relatives.)
A good amount of my family has been in the US since before the Civil War. I haven’t come across any that came in after the war. Oddly enough I’ve only been able to find two or three that actually served in the war. Haven’t really found much on them as they didn’t seem to do much.
I do have one ancestor, and Andrew Kessler, who was part of the Maryland General Assembly and was arrested in September of 1861 for wanting to secede from the union. He was arrested along with 30 or so other people. He was sent to Fort Lafayette in the New York harbor, and then sent to Fort Warren on Georges Island in the Boston Harbor. He decided to accept the loyalty oath in December and went home.
He only served one term in the Maryland assembly, but he served a few years on the local Board of Ed.
It seems that I had an ancestor who served and died but my family was mostly in Michigan at the time so the civilians weren’t impacted directly at all. So, probably no worse than WWI, WWII or the various Asian adventures of the last 60 years.
Lots of family stories. I have several different branches, all Confederate. Some wealthy, some poor. I have been saddened that my last tenuous indirect threads to any first-hand accounts are now all gone, but I tried my best to get everything out of them I could before they passed away. I am referring to the most elderly people I knew growing up, who would have been children in the 1920s and 30s when people who actually lived through The War Between the States were still alive and telling their stories. I am calling it The War Between the States because that is what they called it.
I could talk for hours about it, but the one account those of you here might find the most compelling is of a 3xgreat grandfather and his 2 brothers. All 3 were poor farmers and conscripted into service around 1862 when that was beginning to happen. One brother was killed in Virginia, and when The War was over the 2 survivors set out to walk home to north Georgia. One of the 2 starved to death along the way and had to be left in a ravine somewhere in Tennessee. The one who made it home spent the rest of his life in frail health.
My great Aunt died in 2013 at the age of 93 was a child when he was an old man and she loved him dearly, talked about how kind he was, and that he said he only fought because he didn’t want to be a coward moss back hiding out in the mountains. He hated John C. Calhoun with a passion and would talk about how it was his folly and blind ambition to be President of Something, even if he had to create a country to BE President of, that got The South into The War. Poor folk were fed the propaganda of the day, started by pompous blowhards like John C. Calhoun, who even though he died in 1851, was responsible for setting much of the thinking in motion for convincing non-slaveowning whites that they stood to lose everything unless they fought in the rich man’s war. Plenty of other politicians picked up that propaganda where Calhoun left off and lit up Secessionist fever. I am glad she passed his story down, but I wish I had some of it in his writing rather than just orally.
The paternal branch of my paternal grandfather’s family tree was reported to have had 7 sons of an appropriate age to have fought in the war, but the family patriarch took all of them deep into the Louisiana swamps to ride out the duration. They all survived and helped repopulate at least one southeastern LA parish afterwards.
Meanwhile, his maternal line featured a surveyor/mapmaker from Wisconsin who mapped many of the fortifications along the Mississippi River for the Union Army along with Fort Smith, Arkansas. Post war he relocated his family to the Hammond, LA area where he was a horticulturalist specializing in strawberries and developed several new commercially successful varieties.
My paternal grandmother’s paternal line had at least a couple of cavalry officers who rode with J.E.B. Stuart in various campaigns and her maternal line had several folks that also fought for the Confederacy. I believe they all survived the war.
Unfortunately, if anyone has done any genealogical research on my mother’s side, that information has not been shared with me. But, to the best of my knowledge, her ancestors were well established in Mississippi and Louisiana at that time and most likely had one or more active participants.
Most of our other ancestors were still in Ireland at the time, but there’s this guy who fought for the Union and was apparently notorious enough that DW Griffith was still ticked off enough to villainize the guy thirty years after his death. I’m not exactly sure how many greats he is back in the family tree, but all of the other random Stonemans I’ve met seem to be distant cousins, so the guy’s 4 kids apparently had a lot of descendants.
Me and my surviving relatives aren’t slaves, so that’s a plus. Sharecropping, lynchings and jim crow, not-so-much. If not for the trail of tears and the civil war, I wouldn’t exist.
My great-great-grandfather suffered stomach and intestinal problems, off and on, for the rest of his life, after being incarcerated at the infamous Andersonville prison.