Charles Wesley Myers, Civil War Stevedore

My 3rd great grandfather was Charles Wesley Myers, born in Allen County Indiana on 27 Feb 1842. He moved with his family to Richland County Wisconsin when he was a boy and spent the rest of his life there. The comprehensive History of Richland County Wisconsin by Judge James H. Miner (1906) gives a nice biography of Charles and his life, which can be seen online in a scan of the book here, and in a full text transcription here. Side note: if you have any ancestors who were in that area in the later half of the 19th century, that book is a must-read!

In Miner's biography, it says that he served in the Civil War in 1865 in Alabama and Louisiana. I thought I would dig deeper on Fold3 during their free access to Civil War records, and aside from the typical Service Index records that don't give much more than a name, I came across Charles as a witness in a pension claim of another soldier. It took me a good while to piece together what was going on as Charles's name appeared on images numbered around 150 out of 253 in this collection and the claim was for a different soldier than the one where Charles appears. After reading through the documents imaged, I finally put the pieces together and figured out the story, and got a nice primary resource about Charles's service...

The documents in this image collection on Fold3 are actually for a Sgt. William F Hoyt who was killed by a gunshot wound in the Second Battle of Fredricksburg on 3 May 1863. His widow, Jane (nee Householder) filed an application for a widow's pension in 1869. Many documents in this collection pertain to Jane's request for her widow's pension, but in the middle there are documents requesting compensation for a Walter Blakely who was injured while unloading a ship in Mobile Harbor (Alabama). Walter was Jane's third husband and it was while they were married that these documents were filed - that is why they are grouped together with papers from Hoyt, who was Jane's first husband.

The first papers with Walter's requests were filed on 2 Sep 1881 and state that he was injured in May 1865. He suffered then a "rupture in right groin caused by lifting and shouldering a heavy sack of feed." While he never did anything about it at the time, in 1881 now he claims "the disability has increased to such an extent as to render me unable to perform my usual business," which is farming. For good measure, he adds after this, "How I am going to make a living now, I don't know." So he's clearly in a bad way and looking for support from the government.

For his claim, Walter has included testimonies by a number of other citizens he knows. Some of these are people he served with in the war, some are people who live in his community, and some are both. One such man is Charles Wesley Myers. In 1885, Charles states in his Comrade's Testimony that he knew Walter and served with him in Mobile in May 1865 helping him unload the boat when he hurt himself. There is also a follow up letter in 1888 with further testimony from Charles saying that while he didn't see Blakely's injury at the time, he had been told afterward and has no doubt that that is when the injury occurred. It seems that Blakely was having a was being challenged to prove that he was injured in the service. In the end, Walter's claim was honored and he was paid a pension of $8 per month, that seems to have been effective starting in 1881. In 2015 dollars, this works out to about $200. Not enough to replace a regular income, but hopefully some help for a man who suffered for most of his life for serving our country.

If you want to look at a selection of documents I pulled out of the image collection that are relevant to Charles's involvement, have a look at this document.

Well, this was a lot of work to sort through and understand, and while I am glad to see some letters in my 3rd great grandfather's own hand and have a primary resource for his Civil War service, I have to admit it's a bit anti-climactic. For one, most of the story behind all this and most of the facts I uncovered are about Jane Householder and her husbands. Plus, I found out that while it was noble of Charles to volunteer in the Civil War, he only got into it after the fighting was pretty much over and the only service records I uncovered here is that he was unloading bags of corn in Alabama. :-/ Lot's of time and energy for a finding like that. I don't want to belittle the sacrifices he made and the risk he took by enlisting, but it's a pretty mundane story. It was a good research exercise digging through the papers to uncover the story though, underwhelming as it may have been in the end. Plus I got a nice additional tool (creating a pdf document from multiple images) in my genealogy toolkit I have described in a separate post.

Oh - one more thing. Jane's original pension application was filed with the help of a local attorney. His name was James H. Miner, who later went on to write the history of Richland County referenced above. A nice little bow for this package. :-)