ROOTS & BRANCHES

Over the years, I’ve intentionally stayed away from doing heavy research on my Civil War ancestors. It’s always seemed that there’s such a great volume of information that it’s a rabbit hole into which I might fall … from which I might make my way back.

Well, thank goodness for people such as Laurie Snyder who are willing to fall into those rabbit holes.

Snyder, an educator and genealogist, runs a website devoted to all things about the 47^th Regiment of the Pennsylvania Volunteers, hundreds of men forming 10 companies who were mostly from the Lehigh Valley (a couple of the companies were raised in Perry County and one in Northumberland) and more than half of whom stayed for the during of the war.

“This project started out as a way to try to find out more about my paternal great-grandfather,” Snyder wrote.

“I found a letter to his hometown newspaper that mentioned he’d been wounded in the knee during Sheridan’s 1864 Shenandoah Valley Campaign. That letter was only signed ‘H.D.W.’—so, of course I had to know who ‘H.D.W.’ was because he obviously knew my great-grandfather.”

When Snyder identified H.D.W. as Henry D. Wharton and that apparently he had no living descendants, she couldn’t let his story go untold; so, she researched and wrote about his life.

“Henry wrote the most amazing, beautiful, and funny letters,” Snyder wrote. “And then I learned about the captain of my great-grandfather’s company … Remember those old Lay’s Potato Chip commercials? ‘You can’t eat just one.’ The 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry has proven to be even more addictive.”

It’s easy to understand Snyder’s addiction when it comes to the 47^th.

It was formed in August 1861 and officially mustered out on Christmas Day 1865 in Charleston, South Carolina.

Enrollees included brass and cornet bands as well as Blacks who it encountered during service across the South.

The soldiers endured battles in various places as well the boredom of guard duties behind the fronts.

Some were taken prisoner of war and spent time in a notorious Confederate prison camp.

Those interested in Pennsylvania’s volunteers in the Civil War have benefited from the five-volume History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, compiled by Samuel P. Bates and published by the commonwealth in 1869.

But Snyder’s site makes the Bates volumes seem like a “once over lightly” version.

She’s found the letters and diaries from members of the regiment as well as newspaper accounts mentioning them during the war. And Snyder traced the men after the war and documented the final resting places of many of them.

Truly, it would be a wonderful thing if every regiment had such an angel as Snyder to look over its legacy.

The URL for Snyder’s “47th Pennsylvania Volunteers: One Civil War Regiment’s Story” is https://47thpennsylvaniavolunteers.com/