Posted on 11/09/2016 9:02:23 AM PST by nickcarraway
The small book lay closed with its cover flap fastened around it. Brown showed through the worn corners and in cracks and tears of the black leather. Rosalie Nelson found the book in desk drawer at her parents’ house, while she was packing their belongings after her father died.
Tiny script fills the three sections on each yellowed page for every day of the year.
That year was 1864. Private John Stuart Nelson had just reenlisted for duty in the Civil War and started a diary Jan. 1, at the age of 24.
“Very cold. I nearly froze,” he wrote in the first entry. “I wore a double suit all day.”
She knew the name in looping handwriting inside the front cover. It belonged to her uncle John Stuart Nelson III. But this was the first John Stuart Nelson, the grandfather of her father and uncle. She’d never known about her great-grandfather fighting in the Civil War or anything else about his life.
But she’s getting to know him through his diary, from his reenlistment through the end of the year recovering from a gunshot wound. He never missed a day, and he never complained in his accounts.
Rosalie always loved reading about history to learn about people, the country and world.
“But nothing is more important that family, because these families make up our country,” she said. “Somebody has to care enough to take the time to write the stuff down, and I think it’s vital for a family to know it.”
History saved Nelson’s battle days ended June 22, 1864. He was hit with a Confederate bullet called a Minie ball at Kennesaw Mountain. He wrote names of comrades killed and about waiting for the train to take the wounded in his journal.
Today, the Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park preserves the ground where forces maneuvered and fought from June 19 to July 2, 1864, according to its website. The June 22 fight was the Battle of Kolb’s Farm.
Nelson called his injury a “flesh wound” later in a pension-increase application. The bullet cut through some muscles in the upper third of his right leg. Then gangrene set it, and most of the muscles in his upper limb were destroyed in burning it out.
He mentioned once in the diary that the pain kept him up all night. But “pleasant” was how he started many entries describing days after his injury. He spent the rest of his tour recovering in Louisville, Kentucky, and Cleveland, Ohio.
Later he moved to the territory of New Mexico. Rosalie discovered his voter registration information from 1888 still attached to another paper with a pin. That was the year Benjamin Harrison became president.
Nelson also left behind an 1880 to 1890 diary in a large, hard-bound ledger book detailing his life as a rancher amid business records. He tucked memos and clippings into the pages.
It seems he loved working and spending time outdoors on his ranch and raising his family, despite his injury. Nelson noted details from food brought to family gatherings to long walks accompanied by a friend’s greyhounds “looking for specimens.”
Rosalie’s uncle Nelson moved to Oregon with her parents in his final years and took his grandfather’s diaries with him. Rosalie found them in 1975. She kept the diary safely packed until she moved from Oregon to Casper in 1988. That’s when she started reading the diary.
The small handwriting in faded ink and pencil is difficult to decipher. But Rosalie and her daughter Lynn Griffin still pore through the diary entries and even photocopied each page of the Civil War diary.
“I think it’s invaluable to have,” Lynn said. “I don’t think there’s very many families who have something like this to pass down.”
Connecting generations Rosalie believes she knows why Nelson documented his life with soldierly discipline. She too wrote diaries for decades and saves news clippings, thinking of the generations who could learn from them and feel a connection through her writing. He must have hoped someone would take an interest in them after his life too.
“You know, I kind of think he knows,” she said.
Diaries aren’t the only thing they have in common. Her family also moved to a territory of the U.S. in 1945 when she was 7 and about a decade and a half before Alaska became a state.
“So we both had this adventuresome spirit with us,” she said.
Her father passed along a family love for living in the country to her. She also identifies with Nelson’s frequent jottings about family members and their lives.
“He’s totally involved in family, which I am too,” she said.
Rosalie and Griffin have searched for more information about John Stuart Sr. in genealogy websites and hope to find a photograph as well. They also would like to solve the mystery of a second pocket-sized diary Rosalie found next to Nelson’s Civil War journal. The unnamed diary from 1863 appears to be the writing of a young woman, who started her entries with “Dear Little Friend…”
Rosalie has been reading through her own diaries as she copies them to digital files for her children and future generations.
“The past should not be lost, because it’s a part of every one of us,” she said.
She often finds herself struck by who she was and things she did, like raising three children as a single mother and dealing with trying times.
She’d like ask her great grandfather if he ever felt the same way in his later years.
“I know I did all those things, but now looking at it from the age of 78, I’m kind of amazed at what I was able to do …” she said. “I just wonder if he ever looked back and thought, ‘Was that me?’”
CW Bookmark.
A treasured item for sure.
Sometimes I think it would be fun to live in other times in history, but I'll keep modern medical technology, thanks.
I can’t read cursive... ;)
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