Home Again: Whose Father Was He? Part 5

This is the New York Times' final installment of Erroll Morris's interesting look at the case of Amos Humiston, for which he has extensively interviewed author Mark Dunkelman and Humiston family relatives. This installment also offers many photographs, documents and letters.

There is historical information on the battle at Gettysburg, descriptions of the aftermath of war on battlefields, and of the monument to Humiston, bearing a bronze plaque with a depiction of both Amos and his children. Dunkelman says it is "The only monument to an individual enlisted man on the Gettysburg battlefield.”

The ending paragraphs are compelling to family historians who have photographs of their ancestors - with names and without. Those images represent a real person with a past and, as genealogists, we really want to recreate our past, our families. Sometimes we can connect with that particular person in the image, often we simply can't and can never identify the individual.

At the heart of this is the dream of defeating time and thereby achieving immortality, creating a past that can live on after we die. Mark Dunkelman and David Humiston Kelley were inspired by their grandfather’s stories and spent a considerable fraction of their adult lives sifting through evidence and compiling genealogies. They are placing themselves in the arc of first being inspired by the past and then creating their future place in it. But not everyone is like this. Ironies abound. What about the other Humiston descendants? David Humiston Kelley was obsessed with history, but Allan Cox, who inherited the letters, was much less interested in the past. Mark Dunkelman found the letters, but how many Mark Dunkelmans are there in our futures? How many future historians to lovingly research and recreate our past?

Morris writes:

Perhaps more than any other artifact, the photograph has engaged our thoughts about time and eternity. I say “perhaps,” because the history of photography spans less than 200 years. How many of us have been “immortalized” in a newspaper, a book or a painting vs. how many of us have appeared in a photograph?

The photograph of Amos Humiston’s three children — of Frank, Alice and Fred — allows us to imagine that we have grasped something both unique and universal. It suggests that the experience of this vast, unthinkable war can be reduced to the life and death of one man — by identifying Gettysburg’s “Unknown Soldier” we can reunite a family. That we can be saved from oblivion by an image that reaches and touches people, that communicates something undying and transcendent about each one of us.

The original ambrotype is still missing. Where could it be?

Dunkelman hopes that his book would draw attention to the story and someone would find the ambrotype. Writes Morris:

Perhaps it is displayed on a mantle or in an antiquarian’s shop or in an eccentric, personal collection of Gettysburgiana (like Edward Woodward’s poem).Where is it?Where is the ambrotype? The readership of The Times is respectfully asked to join in the quest. The promise of its return still remains unfulfilled.

Read the complete article at the link above.

Home Again: Whose Father Was He? Part 4

Part Four of this compelling and detailed story in the New York Times continues as writer Errol Morris gets into the not-so-nice happenings at the Homestead. This installment also includes many photographs, documents, maps and family trees.

There's Rosa J. Carmichael, whom he calls Cruella de Vil of the Homestead, of children being punished, of other children acting as informants. The horrible goings-on were exposed in an 1876 series of newspaper articles that detailed denying the orphans food, clothing and education; that they were beaten and subjected to leg irons and hobbling chains.

Dr. Bourns was charged with embezzlement in 1877, including mismanagement, waste of property and violation of trust. In 1878, the sheriff seized the property and the contents were auctioned.

Morris asks author Mark Dunkelman about Bourns' character, and Dunkelman points out what he calls "Jekyll and Hyde aspects to Bourns' personality," which included acts of altruism (reproducing the photograph, raising funds, establishing the orphanage), but then things seem to have gone wrong and he's not sure if it was greed or financial difficulties.

Amos Humiston's daughter Alice was quoted in 1914 in a story about her effort to recover the ambrotype from Dr. Bourns. He refused to return it.

Morris also talked to Amos Humiston's great-grandchildren: archaeoastronomy expert David Humiston Kelley and retired salesman Allan Lawrence Cox.

There's more on Kelley's claim about having traced some family branches back to King David, which will interest genealogists, as as well as the note that he's working with Bennett Greenspan of FamilyTreeDNA.com on this.

And Kelley chimes in with more on Dr. Bourns' personality, as well as a large portion on Kelley's own research of ancient peoples, research on the Mayans and their calendar, the date of the end of the world (in 1220) and the possibilities of recovering ancient history.

His conversation with Allan Cox concerned letters passed down by Humiston's widow Philinda to her son Fred, to Fred's daughter and then to Cox. The originals have vanished but photocopies exist. There are quotes from 14 of Humiston's letters to his wife.

Read the complete article at the link above, to make sense of this all.

Home Again: Whose father was he? Part 2

Don't miss part 2 of Errol Morris's "Whose Father Was He?"

This installment includes an extensive interview with Mark Dunkelman, who wrote the book on Amos Humiston. There are extensive graphics, photographs, maps, letters and more.

How did Dunkelman, who has one of the largest collections of Civil War letters of a single army regiment, become aware of the story?

During my high school years, I became good friends with a neighbor, Christopher L. Ford, who had Confederate ancestors. We both shared this interest in the Civil War. So we would discuss the Civil War often. As a matter of fact, we used to hold sort of trivia contests to see who could stump each other on our Civil War knowledge. And at one point, Chris gave me a book that he had had for a while. It’s called “Gettysburg: What They Did Here,” by L.W. Minnigh.

In the back is a collection of human-interest stories relating to the battle of Gettysburg. The very first one is about John Burns, the elderly Gettysburg resident who took his War of 1812 musket and joined the battle when the armies arrived at his hometown. And the very second story is about the Humiston children. And it included a post-war photo of the three kids, a very brief description of the story and a copy of James Clark’s poem/song, “The Children of the Battlefield.” That was my first exposure to the Humiston story.

Among other resource, Dunkelman used Humiston's pension records, which held more material on his wife and children.

This story became notable because a Philadelphia doctor obtained a photograph from a tavern-keeper. It also illustrates the power of media - a story copied in many newspapers reached the right family.

The story is one of chance - and filled with "ifs." If the wagon had not broken down, if the tavern-keeper had refused to give the photo to the doctor, if the wife had not read the story in the paper ...

Dr. Bourns did not travel directly from Philadelphia to Gettysburg. Instead, he first went to Chambersburg, a designated rendezvous for civilian physicians heading to the battlefield. Had he gone direct from Philadelphia to Gettysburg, he would not have passed through Graeffenburg, as he did by approaching Gettysburg from the west. And he would not have stopped at Schriver’s tavern and would not have seen the ambrotype.

Dunkelman found a Humiston decendant -David Humiston Kelley - from whom he learned about what happened to Philinda and her three children. Says Dunkelman,

Now, David, in addition to his archaeoastronomy work, is a very avid genealogist. He’s traced branches of his family back to King David in the Bible.

Note please that I didn't say that, but Dunkelman says it about Kelley.

He found many letters in the possession of various family families. Several are imaged in the article.

Soldiers’ families saved their letters. They were writing letters all the time back then, but these were letters chronicling the most momentous events in their lives. Often they didn’t save the letters that the wife sent the husband. They saved the letters that were sent from the husband or son describing these great adventures.

Dunkelman also discovered that Humiston sailed on a whaler from New Bedford in 1850, with the help of a neighbor who was a librarian at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

There's more to come in the next three installments. Read the complete post at the link above and view the images.