A Civil War Love StoryBy Annalisa Grier | March 13, 2012I know my great-great-great-grandfather’s na

A Civil War Love StoryBy Annalisa Grier | March 13, 2012I know my great-great-great-grandfather’s name: David P. Grier. I know his birthday (December 26, 1836), and I know when he got married (September 17, 1863), and to whom. I know my great-great-great-grandmother’s name (Anna McKinney) and her birthday (August 12, 1840), and I have pictures of both of them in round wooden frames. Her hair is up and she looks mildly amused; he looks very serious and wears a superb mustache. I know where they lived (Peoria, then St. Louis) and how many children they had (seven), and I know that their wedding was “the most colorful and romantic wedding of the nineteenth century in Peoria.” I know that she was “tall and regal in appearance” as well as being “kind, unselfish, and noble”; I know that he was “confident, eager, and courageous,” “bold, dashing, and impetuous,” and “more than ordinarily good looking even as men go,” which is rather a charming thing to learn about one’s ancestor.Here is another thing that I know: they were madly in love, which is quite another thing to learn about one’s great-great-great-grandparents. I know this because David wrote Anna letters about it, and I have read them. (Anna’s letters haven’t survived — she asked him to burn them — but she saved his; and they did get married, raise children, and live together until his death, so I assume the feeling was mutual.) They don’t require much reading between the lines. “[I]f I should wander the United States over I would never forget you nor cease to love you,” he writes. “They might pass me by all the beautiful young Ladies in the universe and they would make no impression on me for my heart is irrecoverably lost and it is yours, for ever.”He wrote her this the year before they married, from Paducah, Kentucky, where he was stationed as a Union officer in the Civil War. And he wrote things like this repeatedly — from his enlistment in 1861 until the end of the war in 1865, hardly a week went by without him sending her a letter professing his love. They were written in the lengthy downtime of the army, sitting around waiting for orders or for the next engagement, in the aftermath of battle, while on steamers going up or down the Mississippi.Read more -- source link

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