Librería Samer Atenea
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In August 1862, a twenty-year-old farm laborer with little schooling, enlisted in Company E of the 17th Michigan Infantry. Within weeks, James Masters was under fire at South Mountain, where his regiment earned the title 'The Stonewall Regiment.' Over the next three years he marched thousands of miles as part of 'Burnside’s Geography Class,' survived Antietam and the slaughter at Spotsylvania, and was captured and held at Andersonville Prison and the Florence Stockade. When he was finally released, he weighed 65 pounds. James never rose above the rank of private. He was not a general or a hero of textbooks. He was an ordinary soldier whose endurance made everything that came after him possible. Drawing on pension depositions, regimental histories, prisoner narratives, census records, and decades of archival research, David L. Curtis reconstructs both the war James survived and the family that descended from him, tracing five generations across Michigan and beyond. James Masters, A Civil War Soldier: His Life and Legacy is a tribute to survival, memory, and the ordinary lives that history usually leaves unrecorded.The genealogy chapters open with Daniel and Phoebe (Kilborn) Masters in Kitley, Ontario, and follow the family through Junius, Seneca County, New York, to Augusta and York Townships in Washtenaw County, Michigan, and on to Milan, Northville, and Plymouth. Allied surnames include Kilborn, Bissell, Case, Bell, Gregg, Hance, McKahan, Sowle, and Curtis, and the line carries a documented descent from Mayflower passenger John Billington. Alongside the military record, Curtis draws on county deed and land records, Michigan vital records, city directories, Grand Army of the Republic post records, newspapers, cemetery and DNA evidence, and family letters, all cited in footnotes. Photographs of family artifacts, gravestones, houses, and a pedigree chart are included, with an editor’s afterword by a descendant living near the Florence Stockade site.
