thedrifter
07-14-03, 08:56 AM
Mission at Gettysburg
Back From Iraq, a Marine Lays a Civil War Mystery to Rest
By Wil Haygood
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 14, 2003; Page A01
GETTYSBURG, Pa., July 13 -- The dead soldier, to be sure, remains quite dead.
But Chuck Ikins, the living and breathing soldier, kept trying to prove that the dead soldier was his dead soldier, his great-great-uncle Simeon Ikins.
The people at Gettysburg National Cemetery told Ikins that his Uncle Simeon was, indeed, buried there. They pleasantly pointed him over to a grave site.
The stone at Grave No. 119, however, read "J.C. Kent."
Who was J.C. Kent?
A ghost, as it turns out.
So for four years, the ballad of J.C. Kent became the ballad of Chuck Ikins. In order for Chuck Ikins to find his lost relative from the Civil War, he had to comb medical records, riffle through papers at the National Archives, sift Union Army regimental rosters and unravel the mysteries of Civil War-era handwriting. Then there was a pause in the action as Lt. Col. Chuck Ikins packed his gear and headed to Iraq.
For a war of his own.
He was in the desert when the riddle got solved. When the soldier who had died at Gettysburg was finally given his true name.
He was just one soldier. But why can't one soldier give resonance to the battle that took place 140 years ago this month? He died at the battlefield hospital. Lincoln's granite-like words would have floated out over him a mere three months later during the Gettysburg Address. ("It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.") It was the battle that signaled the beginning of the end.
And in the end, there appeared a ghost.
But all of that is getting ahead of the unraveling of the mystery of J.C. Kent, which, although it ended here today, actually began with a man who sold used cars in rural Ohio.
Visit to a Graveyard
Chuck Ikins is sitting at the living room table of his home in Alexandria. His research on his great-great-Uncle Simeon is scattered about. On the floor nearby is a large case of materials that Ikins needed for his role as a Marine officer in Iraq. Above that, there's a daguerreotype from a reunion of the 136th Regiment of New York Volunteers, Uncle Simeon's regiment. Sober-looking men. Simeon is not in the photo.
"He was lost to the family," Chuck Ikins says of Simeon Ikins. "That's the interesting part of the story: how we found him."
Chuck's father, Thomas Clifford Ikins, sold used cars in Barberton, Ohio. He also collected antiques. "You know the daguerreotypes, the cases for them? My dad was buying the cases when no one was buying them." Ikins traveled around Ohio with his father. Down long curvy roads, crisscrossing farmland. "I spent my childhood going to antique shows with my dad," says Ikins. "My dad was a sort of Renaissance man -- and a car salesman."
The cars got sold and the antiques got bought. At the dinner table while growing up there was talk of long-ago wars. Ikins became fixated on family lineage. "I remember people saying we had an ancestor who had died at Gettysburg. But it was always, like, myth."
He went to Ohio State University, was in ROTC, gulped history down. He discovered the name Simeon Ikins while he was looking for his great-great-great-grandfather, Thomas Ikins. As he explains: "Thomas Ikins had several sons. William, one son, is my great-great-grandfather. His brother, Simeon, is my great-great-uncle. William had a son, William Frederick Ikins, who would be my great-grandfather. He had a son, George, my grandfather. George had a son, who would be Thomas, my father."
In 1998, sending out questions on a genealogical Web site, Chuck Ikins heard from Marilyn Hillison, who lives outside Joliet, Ill. "My mother's grandfather was Joseph Ikins, Simeon's brother," said Hillison, who had been doing research into her family's genealogy, particularly its Irish roots.
She shared all her information about Thomas Ikins. Then he had a question: "Do you know anything about Simeon Ikins?"
She knew plenty. He had served and died in the Civil War. He served with a regiment out of New York state. "That was it!" Ikins says.
"See, I had been writing Gettysburg for years. I probably passed within 100 yards of his grave without even knowing it."
Simeon Ikins was real. Dead, but real. "It was like this connection over history," Ikins says. "It was my connection to a guy who had been at one of the pivotal battles in history."
So in 1998 he got the folks at Gettysburg on the line. He was coming to visit. He just needed the location of Simeon Ikins's grave. "I called up. I said, 'Do you have a Simeon Ikins buried in the cemetery?' She said, 'Yes, he's buried in Section D, Grave 119, the New York section, because they buried these guys by states.' I get Debbie [his wife] and we drive to Gettysburg."
The folks at the visitor center pointed him to Section D. He peered at stones and kept moving, looking. Finally, there it was, Grave 119.
"I go up to the stone and I don't find Simeon's name on the stone. I find 'J.C. Kent.' I say, 'Who the hell is J.C. Kent?' I go back to the visitor center and say, 'It's not Simeon Ikins's name on the gravestone; it's J.C. Kent.' " Ikins was told by cemetery officials that the registrar listed a "Simeon Ikins" who should have been buried there. They were as confused as he was. He and Debbie shook their heads driving all the way back home: Who was in Grave 119?
Soon enough, Ikins tracked down John Busey, a Gettysburg buff who had written a book about those killed in the battle. Busey was working at the Department of Agriculture as a program analyst with the food stamp program.
Busey told Ikins that he had to get hold of Simeon Ikins's wartime hospital records and chart his movements from wounding to burial. "I believe it falls to me to take the necessary steps to correct this 135-year-old error," Ikins told Gettysburg officials back in 1998.
Simeon Ikins
A soldier's story:
His family emigrated from England. Growing up, he was known to walk long distances without complaint. He joined the Civil War when he was 18, attached to a company of New York Volunteers, Company K, 136th Regiment. He hailed from a small town, Wales, just outside Buffalo, where he farmed.
He was with his regiment when they fought at the Battle of Chancellorsville.
He slept under a tent.
He was with them when they fought at the Battle of Fredericksburg. He would have turned 19 while at war. He did not leave a wife behind. And he was with them during those three infamous days in July 1863, when 160,000 Union and Confederate combatants squared off on a piece of Pennsylvania farmland. He would have heard the musket fire coming.
"He was wounded by a musket ball on the battlefield," says Marilyn Hillison, the young soldier's great-niece. Hillison discovered that Ikins spent hours on the ground before being taken to an aid station. He would have stared at the sky. In the great battle, more than 10,000 would die. More than 30,000 were wounded.
A newspaper account at the time detailed the site: "This town . . . is literally one vast and over-crowded hospital . . . several thousands are lying, with arms and legs amputated, and every other kind of conceivable wound, in tents, on the open field, in the woods, in stables and barns, and some of them even on the bare ground, without cover or shelter."
When finally retrieved, Simeon Ikins was taken to Camp Letterman, a makeshift hospital on the battlefield. He survived less than two months and died of gangrene Aug. 29, 1863.
http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/homepage/hp7-13-03i.jpg
Chuck Ikins corrects the gravestone of his great great uncle. (Timothy Jacobsen - for The Post)
That fall, soldiers were disinterred, in preparation for a national cemetery, and reburied on the site.
A 19-year-old "lost not only his life, but his identity," says Hillison.
continued......
Back From Iraq, a Marine Lays a Civil War Mystery to Rest
By Wil Haygood
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 14, 2003; Page A01
GETTYSBURG, Pa., July 13 -- The dead soldier, to be sure, remains quite dead.
But Chuck Ikins, the living and breathing soldier, kept trying to prove that the dead soldier was his dead soldier, his great-great-uncle Simeon Ikins.
The people at Gettysburg National Cemetery told Ikins that his Uncle Simeon was, indeed, buried there. They pleasantly pointed him over to a grave site.
The stone at Grave No. 119, however, read "J.C. Kent."
Who was J.C. Kent?
A ghost, as it turns out.
So for four years, the ballad of J.C. Kent became the ballad of Chuck Ikins. In order for Chuck Ikins to find his lost relative from the Civil War, he had to comb medical records, riffle through papers at the National Archives, sift Union Army regimental rosters and unravel the mysteries of Civil War-era handwriting. Then there was a pause in the action as Lt. Col. Chuck Ikins packed his gear and headed to Iraq.
For a war of his own.
He was in the desert when the riddle got solved. When the soldier who had died at Gettysburg was finally given his true name.
He was just one soldier. But why can't one soldier give resonance to the battle that took place 140 years ago this month? He died at the battlefield hospital. Lincoln's granite-like words would have floated out over him a mere three months later during the Gettysburg Address. ("It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.") It was the battle that signaled the beginning of the end.
And in the end, there appeared a ghost.
But all of that is getting ahead of the unraveling of the mystery of J.C. Kent, which, although it ended here today, actually began with a man who sold used cars in rural Ohio.
Visit to a Graveyard
Chuck Ikins is sitting at the living room table of his home in Alexandria. His research on his great-great-Uncle Simeon is scattered about. On the floor nearby is a large case of materials that Ikins needed for his role as a Marine officer in Iraq. Above that, there's a daguerreotype from a reunion of the 136th Regiment of New York Volunteers, Uncle Simeon's regiment. Sober-looking men. Simeon is not in the photo.
"He was lost to the family," Chuck Ikins says of Simeon Ikins. "That's the interesting part of the story: how we found him."
Chuck's father, Thomas Clifford Ikins, sold used cars in Barberton, Ohio. He also collected antiques. "You know the daguerreotypes, the cases for them? My dad was buying the cases when no one was buying them." Ikins traveled around Ohio with his father. Down long curvy roads, crisscrossing farmland. "I spent my childhood going to antique shows with my dad," says Ikins. "My dad was a sort of Renaissance man -- and a car salesman."
The cars got sold and the antiques got bought. At the dinner table while growing up there was talk of long-ago wars. Ikins became fixated on family lineage. "I remember people saying we had an ancestor who had died at Gettysburg. But it was always, like, myth."
He went to Ohio State University, was in ROTC, gulped history down. He discovered the name Simeon Ikins while he was looking for his great-great-great-grandfather, Thomas Ikins. As he explains: "Thomas Ikins had several sons. William, one son, is my great-great-grandfather. His brother, Simeon, is my great-great-uncle. William had a son, William Frederick Ikins, who would be my great-grandfather. He had a son, George, my grandfather. George had a son, who would be Thomas, my father."
In 1998, sending out questions on a genealogical Web site, Chuck Ikins heard from Marilyn Hillison, who lives outside Joliet, Ill. "My mother's grandfather was Joseph Ikins, Simeon's brother," said Hillison, who had been doing research into her family's genealogy, particularly its Irish roots.
She shared all her information about Thomas Ikins. Then he had a question: "Do you know anything about Simeon Ikins?"
She knew plenty. He had served and died in the Civil War. He served with a regiment out of New York state. "That was it!" Ikins says.
"See, I had been writing Gettysburg for years. I probably passed within 100 yards of his grave without even knowing it."
Simeon Ikins was real. Dead, but real. "It was like this connection over history," Ikins says. "It was my connection to a guy who had been at one of the pivotal battles in history."
So in 1998 he got the folks at Gettysburg on the line. He was coming to visit. He just needed the location of Simeon Ikins's grave. "I called up. I said, 'Do you have a Simeon Ikins buried in the cemetery?' She said, 'Yes, he's buried in Section D, Grave 119, the New York section, because they buried these guys by states.' I get Debbie [his wife] and we drive to Gettysburg."
The folks at the visitor center pointed him to Section D. He peered at stones and kept moving, looking. Finally, there it was, Grave 119.
"I go up to the stone and I don't find Simeon's name on the stone. I find 'J.C. Kent.' I say, 'Who the hell is J.C. Kent?' I go back to the visitor center and say, 'It's not Simeon Ikins's name on the gravestone; it's J.C. Kent.' " Ikins was told by cemetery officials that the registrar listed a "Simeon Ikins" who should have been buried there. They were as confused as he was. He and Debbie shook their heads driving all the way back home: Who was in Grave 119?
Soon enough, Ikins tracked down John Busey, a Gettysburg buff who had written a book about those killed in the battle. Busey was working at the Department of Agriculture as a program analyst with the food stamp program.
Busey told Ikins that he had to get hold of Simeon Ikins's wartime hospital records and chart his movements from wounding to burial. "I believe it falls to me to take the necessary steps to correct this 135-year-old error," Ikins told Gettysburg officials back in 1998.
Simeon Ikins
A soldier's story:
His family emigrated from England. Growing up, he was known to walk long distances without complaint. He joined the Civil War when he was 18, attached to a company of New York Volunteers, Company K, 136th Regiment. He hailed from a small town, Wales, just outside Buffalo, where he farmed.
He was with his regiment when they fought at the Battle of Chancellorsville.
He slept under a tent.
He was with them when they fought at the Battle of Fredericksburg. He would have turned 19 while at war. He did not leave a wife behind. And he was with them during those three infamous days in July 1863, when 160,000 Union and Confederate combatants squared off on a piece of Pennsylvania farmland. He would have heard the musket fire coming.
"He was wounded by a musket ball on the battlefield," says Marilyn Hillison, the young soldier's great-niece. Hillison discovered that Ikins spent hours on the ground before being taken to an aid station. He would have stared at the sky. In the great battle, more than 10,000 would die. More than 30,000 were wounded.
A newspaper account at the time detailed the site: "This town . . . is literally one vast and over-crowded hospital . . . several thousands are lying, with arms and legs amputated, and every other kind of conceivable wound, in tents, on the open field, in the woods, in stables and barns, and some of them even on the bare ground, without cover or shelter."
When finally retrieved, Simeon Ikins was taken to Camp Letterman, a makeshift hospital on the battlefield. He survived less than two months and died of gangrene Aug. 29, 1863.
http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/homepage/hp7-13-03i.jpg
Chuck Ikins corrects the gravestone of his great great uncle. (Timothy Jacobsen - for The Post)
That fall, soldiers were disinterred, in preparation for a national cemetery, and reburied on the site.
A 19-year-old "lost not only his life, but his identity," says Hillison.
continued......