“My husband jokingly calls him ‘Uncle Dave,’ ” she said of the soldier, who was three generations removed - a brother of her husband’s great-grandfather. And so you just knew that that’s who it was.” “And this picture was just always in the family. “If you have a family member who dies at the age of 19 in the Civil War, everyone knows that,” she said. Karen Thatcher said that the Civil War is still “close” in her area and that her family, with deep roots there, has long known of the story. 19, 1863, in the Battle of Buckland Mills, which was such a complete Confederate victory that the rebels called it “the Buckland Races.” He died the next day, acccording to Johnson’s research. “It’s been published in a few books.” But no name was associated with it.ĭavid Thatcher, it turns out, served in a storied unit that was originally commanded by the South’s legendary cavalry general J.E.B. Liljenquist, of McLean, said he bought the picture years ago at a Civil War show, probably in Virginia. His unit was deduced because his get-up exactly matched that in another picture of a soldier from Berkeley Troop, the experts said. Johnson said experts were able to glean some information about the soldier from his uniform type and accouterments - his frock coat with the lateral, braided “frogging,” his Virginia state seal belt buckle, and the crossed sabers and the number 1 on his cap. “Maybe he gave it to his girlfriend before he left for the war,” Johnson said.Įventually, someone came into possession of it and didn’t know who he was, and it went onto the collectors market. What happened to the original photograph is less clear. “Since he died in the war, they probably had this made. ![]() “That way, people would have something they could hang on their walls,” she said. The larger image - which was probably copied from the photograph - is a “crayon enlargement,” said Carol Johnson, the Library of Congress’s curator of photographs.Ĭrayon enlargement was a common 19th-century technique in which a picture was enlarged, printed and then colored in with charcoal or chalk to make a bigger portrait. The identification was made when Thatcher saw that the photo in the advertisement looked almost exactly like a larger image she had of David Thatcher, an ancestor of her husband, Larry. This anonymous young boy has gotten his life back.” Liljenquist, who has given the library almost 1,000 Civil War portraits in recent months, said: “I’m just awestruck. . . that we’re able to put a name to that face.” “There’s something very satisfying about this 19-year-old boy who died in 1863 who was unidentified. “We’re just tickled to death,” Thatcher said in a telephone interview Wednesday. ![]() The identification thrilled Karen Thatcher, a retired federal government worker, as well as the library and the collector, Tom Liljenquist, who bought the picture several years ago and donated it in October. Family lore has it that his parents brought his body home with a horse and wagon. Thatcher, a farmer’s son from Martinsburg, who enlisted at 17 in Company B, Berkeley Troop, First Virginia Cavalry, on April 19, 1861, a week after the war began.Īt 19, he was mortally wounded in battle outside Warrenton in 1863, and he was buried in the cemetery at Martinsburg’s Tuscarora Presbyterian Church, where he rests today. In an instant, for posterity, the soldier was given back his name - and his story.
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