Gideon Barnes Came Home to Die

First a little background to this post and how things evolved with my discoveries. Last fall I discovered the picture of Gideon in our basement in a long forgotten treasure box of  Barnes family papers and photos. He is one of two GG Granduncles  of my wife, to die of wounds suffered in the Civil War.  The photo intrigued me since he looked like such a pleasant young man. He is descended from Thomas Barnes of New Haven¹ and many of his forbearers served in conflicts since the very beginning of this country.

His immediate family consisted of his mother Luianna Smith, his father Sherman , 3 sisters and 4 brothers. He also had been married 6 years to Lydia Ann Hall of Wallingford and they had no children²
His father and brothers were quite industrious being mechanically inclined and involved in the clock making industry in Bristol ³  and silverware in Meriden.⁴

When we had returned from Florida this spring , I found Gideon’s grave in the Forestville Cemetery in the Forestville section of Bristol. It was located adjacent to the very large family plot of his brother Rodney Barnes.  Not knowing any other details of Gideon's life I thought it was great he was next to family. In the previously mentioned Barnes box there were extensive notes , narratives and correspondence of my wife’s grandfather C.H.Barnes, there was no other information on Gideon. Given the amount of information he had gathered (mostly early 1900’s) I thought it strange
This is why today we are fortunate to have the internet and bloggers to help us to find clues and information. I had read a guest post on Bryna O’Sullivans  blog Explorations in Connecticut Genealogy by John Banks. I went to John Banks’ Civil War Blog and found he had written information on Gideon. I contacted him and offered the above picture and some background  on the family.  John  then did some further research  and shared it with me. This is how I found out about Gideon's wife and where she was buried. John then wrote a wonderful post about Gideon with this information. I can’t say enough about his kindness and his wonderful project.   John will be including a poster of Gideon at the 150 th  anniversary reenactment  of the Antietam battle to be held Sept 29-30 in Wickham Park, Manchester Ct
This is the home site of Sherman and his son Monroe, who had returned home from Meriden to help his father run the farm and machine shop⁴.
  Gideon returns home in early October. John Banks documents in the above mentioned post the following report : "Wounds and injuries received in the battle of Antietam by rifle ball through the thick portion of the thigh causing explosive separation with sloughing," Dr. T.W. Camp noted. "This in connection with an uncontrollable camp diarrhea accompanied with delirium and typhoid fever were more than sufficient to cause death." 
One can only imagine what life was like in that small home, for now it contained, Sherman with a less than pleasant temperament, Lieuanna credited as having a pleasant demeanor. ⁴ and of course  Gideon  and his wife Lydia. Gideon died Nov.17 1862 exactly two months after the battle. The family also lost the 5 year old son of Rodney a few weeks earlier on Nov, 3 1862.
Again thanks to John Banks I found Gideon wife Lydia had remarried and was buried in the same cemetery as Gideon ⁵. I returned to the cemetery and expected a long search,  I got out of the car next to Gideon's marker and low and behold Lydia’s marker was right in front of me. It turns out Gideon lies next to her second husband  and she is next in line.  It seems Gideon was never forgotten by his wife. I wonder if  he knew the  new husband as they were about the same age , a clock maker and also a veteran.
I’m so very glad that his story has been told. 

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1 The Barnes Family Year Book, Trescott C. Barnes, Riverton Ct.

2 http://john-banks.blogspot.com

3 Bristol,Connecticut: “in Olden Time New Cambridge” which includes Forestville  -By Eddy N. Smith, George Benton Smith, Allena J. Dates, Garret W. F. Blanchfield. Google Books copy

4 Family notes of C.H.Barnes

5 http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=77378150

 

1st post attempt in 9 Months & I Panic

I hadn't posted but a few times in the last two years and I thought I would attempt share some of my recent discoveries. First I discover the Blogger Dashboard has changed ! Not sure where I landed first but didn't see the new post button. I recently scanned about 100 photos and copied several hundred pages as PDFs.
Poor planning  as Adobe version I have wouldn't allow coping the text or convert to text. I had visions of having to type them out or rescan as JPG's . The idea for the PDF's  was to be able to share via e-mail to various relatives, which I am doing.
I had uploaded a few to Google Docs so I headed over there to see what I could do. No luck at first but I found references to an OCR feature. I finally found that I needed to re-upload the PDF and use the convert option that appears in order to save as a Google text format. It worked well on the first sample which was small in size which I will paste below, so all was not for naught.
The documents I scanned were written and typed by my wife's grandfather probably between 1915 and 1930.
They included hand written research notes, correspondence, reflections on his fathers life as well as his own.
He answered questions I had wondered about, such as where did his gg grandfather disappear to and where were his grandfather and mother were buried.
I'll have to use another post to explained why these documents sat in boxes in my basement while I scoured the internet and local history repositories.

Here is the first converted scan, it came out great  :