Connor Wordless Wednesday

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Brannigan and Learmouth Wordless Wednesday

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18th Royal Irish Regiment

I will be the first to admit that I am not knowledgeable about United States military organization, so I definitely do not have a lot of experience with British forces. What I was able to gather from different sources, including this history of the 18th Royal Irish Regiment, the regiment existed from 1684 until 1922 (when Ireland became an independent republic), serving in British imperial conflicts all over the world.

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Ernest McClintock

I tried to find out more information about PFC McClintock, but almost everything you can find online for the 83rd Division is about their World War II service.  The one consistent piece of information I discovered was that most of the soldiers were from Ohio.  Perhaps in a few years when more resources go online, I’ll be able to learn more about this soldier.

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A Place Called Vietnam

When you mention the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, D.C., most people think of the Wall. There was a lot of controversy concerning that memorial, so let me state that while I’m not showing it here, it is not because I dislike it. The Wall is powerful. But I’ve always been drawn to more literal depictions of things, rather than abstracts, so I wanted to take a moment to look at a second portion of the memorial – the statues of the three solders that stand near the etched roll of names.

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Lewis Wordless Wednesday

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Lynch Wordless Wednesday

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Artificer

Melvin Larimer’s stone identifies him as having been an artificer in the Spanish-American War. I might have seen other stones with the designation before, but I hadn’t noticed. On Fort Sumter’s website, I found “artificer” in their FAQ section. Paraphrasing, an artificer would have been an enlisted artillery man with a specialized skill that allowed him to supervise or organize that kind of work.

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Our immigrant past

Sacred to the memory of Alexander Doull, Colonel of Artillery in the Army of the Potomac, previously lieutenant in the Royal British Artillery

The inscription on Colonel Doull’s tombstone reminds us of a fact about the United States Civil War that be forgotten – the important role that immigrants played in the armies. About 25% of the Union army was estimated to be foreign-born immigrants. With the rate of immigration in the 19th century, we also have to assume that there was a significant slice of the United States-born soldiers who had parents or grandparents who were immigrants.

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A short service

Samuel Pickands joined the 1st Regiment, Ohio Volunteer Artillery, on February 1, 1862. By the end of March, he was dead, most likely of disease. According to the Ohio Roster Commission’s Offical Roster of soldiers, Pickands died on March 25 in Parkersburg, West Virginia. The tombstone identifies his place of death as Virginia rather than West Virginia. As West Virginia did not enter the Union until June 20, 1863, Pickand and his family would have known the state where he died as Virginia. Even if they were aware of the movement for West Virginia to become its own state, the convention to create a state constitution did not present a document for ratification until mid-February, and the ratification occurred at least a month after Pickands’ death.

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