GDG- "Civil War isn't distant for Union soldier's son"

[Mike Murphy]

For those who may be interested, below is the response I received from the author to my query about the state/regiment status of one Henry Williams.
   
  "Sir--
 
Thanks for your note.  Henry Williams served in Company I, 37th Regiment, KY as a private and into 4th Kentucky Veteran Infantry."
 
  Interesting stuff.......
   
  Mike Murphy
  St. Louis, Missouri


Mike Murphy <murphstl at yahoo.com> wrote:
  Esteemed GDG Member Contributes:


This is an interesting article that appeared in today's St. Louis Post Dispatch, and I thought some folks might find it interesting. However, as I suspect many of you might also pick up on, the article does not apparently make clear what state/regiment Henry Williams actually served with. I have asked the author of the article if he had any information on that. 

In the meantime, however, might any of you have any questions as to on-line archives, federal, state, regimental, that I might try? I'm just kind of curious about it.

Mike Murphy
St. Louis, Missouri


http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/illinoisnews/story/80D3BC1003C820F486257295001145C8?OpenDocument

Civil War isn't distant for Union soldier's son
By Nicholas J.C. Pistor
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
03/05/2007


The bitter reality of the American Civil War — an event poet Walt Whitman called "the seething Hell" — lives on in a Granite City retirement community.

George Williams, 95, is the son of a Union soldier from Kentucky who ran away from home to fight on some of the bloodiest landscapes during the Civil War. He will be installed tonight as a member of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War.

The local chapter of the organization serving the St. Louis area, known as U.S. Grant Camp No. 68, believes Williams is one of the last direct Civil War veteran descendants in the area.

To many, the Civil War is just a historic event in the distant past. To Williams, it's an epic struggle washed in blood. His father, Henry, told him the stories of what it was like to hear the cannons' blast, to see the Southern hills littered with dead bodies, and to feel the emotion of neighbor fighting neighbor. 


"He believed in the fight," Williams said. "The South almost whipped them."

His father, who was 64 when Williams was born, helped release Union prisoners at Camp Sumter, a notorious Confederate military prison in Andersonville, Ga.

"He told us how horribly the prisoners of war were treated," Williams said. "Most of those found alive had bad diseases."

The proud son added: "My dad helped get them released."

Williams said his father also had told stories of Shiloh, a major battle in Tennessee that left thousands dead.

"They would find dead soldiers there, and almost all of them were shot above the neck," he said. "A lot of them, right between the eyes."

Williams' father returned to Kentucky on a freight train at the end of the war, but life there was difficult. The state was filled with Confederate sympathizers, and they didn't much care for those who had fought for the Union.

"He said he always had a black eye whenever he was in Kentucky after the war," Williams said.

The painful division of civil war lasted long after the last shot was fired.

So Henry Williams, a man who passionately believed in the Union cause until his death, moved to southern Missouri to follow a woman he had previously married and divorced. He convinced the woman to remarry him. But the marriage soon fell apart, and they divorced for a second time.

In 1900, Henry Williams married another woman, Melvina Parnell. He was 53, she was 22. They had three children, one them George Williams, who was born in 1911. The family made its home near Thayer, Mo., a small town on the Arkansas border, where Williams said his father was awarded 40 acres for his service in the war.

Williams said his father was a skilled whiskey distiller and often left the house late at night to help a southern Missouri bootlegger.

During the day, he was a carpenter.

Henry Williams died in 1927; he spent his last years at the State Federal Soldiers' Home of Missouri in St. James.

George Williams moved to St. Louis in the 1940s, where he eventually began working for McDonnell Douglas. He and his late wife had seven children.

Today, his five surviving children often crowd his apartment in Granite City, at times reciting the war stories of their grandfather with the same vivid details their father uses.

History is important to this family.
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