Connecting

In researching the history of the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection and my grandfather’s participation in it, I went to the Minnesota Historical Society’s Research Center to see what they might have in the archives.  Even though my grandfather wasn’t from Minnesota, I thought there might be some documents or books concerning the participation of the 13th Minnesota Regiment in the Philippines during that war, just like my grandfather.  I hoped I might find something to help me get a feel for my grandfather’s experiences in the same place.  I browsed the bibliography and found a listing for a file of letters written by a Minnesota soldier who had served in the Philippines.  The staff retrieved the file box from the back and brought it to my seat in the center of the room.  I wasn’t sure what the box and the letters held, but I was totally unprepared for the experience I was about to have.
 
The box contained about twelve neatly labeled manila folders filled with the personal letters of Edmund P. Neill, a twenty year old soldier from Red Wing, written to his parents, detailing his life as a young soldier in the 13th Minnesota.  The letters contained wonderful descriptive details of the experiences and observations of a young man away from home for the first time.  There must have been nearly a hundred letters in the folders, telling of his unit’s assembling point at Camp Ramsey in St. Paul, of his train trip across America, of Camp Merritt in San Francisco, of the cruise by ship to Manila, of the ugliness of the war and finally of his trip back home a year and a half later. 

The letters were written in his hand, in pencil and in pen, and on stationery and plain notebook paper of varying sizes, each painting beautiful, ugly and sometimes humorous word pictures.  His hand writing sometimes wiggled as he wrote from the train taking him to San Francisco or from the ship transporting him to the Philippines.  The letters had not been written as history, but as simple family letters home from a loving son.  However, as I read them, they became the living history of a young man capturing an adventure, not unlike my grandfather.

While the letters gave me a deep sense of personal connection with a man I never met and long dead, it was another small bit of paper that brought his story home on even more connective terms.  In the last folder there was a small note, written in ink, on heavier manila paper.  It was a pass, hand-written by a superior, intended to serve as his passage on a train into Manilla on army business.  It was not the note itself that grabbed my tears; it was the discolored stains of his sweat around the edges.  I could see him folding it and placing it in his pocket on a hot and steamy jungle day in the Philippines.  I could see him taking it from his pocket and discovering that his perspiration had dampened and discolored it.  This small sweat-stained remnant of that hot and humid day lay before my eyes nearly a hundred years later.  His personal thoughts and observations had flowed from his mind through his pencil and pen onto the pages of his letters, but his sweat had flowed from his physical being.   I could almost feel his presence.  He was as real to me as my own grandfather.  His sweat and the stains it left behind told a story of the human side of history.

Our ancestors were a part of the history of their time, no matter how small.  We are part of the story of our time and our descendants will someday want to know our stories and the events that helped shape us as individuals, as families and as Americans.  It is an obligation to attempt to preserve our stories in order that future generations might see the history of this country in human terms—in family terms.  In order to tell the stories of our families, we must be willing to make a personal commitment to recording their legacies by extracting the stories from our own memories and those of other living relatives, the archives of dimmed photographs (often without names), family bibles, diaries, letters, newspapers, obituaries, yearbooks, census records, land records, birth certificates, death certificates, marriage certificates, military records and other little scraps left behind that begin to paint a picture of a journey through life and the history of a time. 

As you patiently piece together these small webs of human information and marry them with the recorded history of their time, wonderful stories of individuals, of families and of America begin to emerge.  You will begin to see that each life—each crack of light --  has a meaning of its own.  We tend not to look at our own lives as human history, but each of us should consider it our obligation to leave a part of ourselves behind.  These simple acts of recording our lives, no matter how mundane we feel our lives may be, will give your life a perpetuity for generations to come.  But most of all it will add meaning to your own life.

We are all unique, but also linked together as human beings.

Sam