Check out this photo of veterans of the 157th NY Infantry resting by their historical marker.
Wonder what that dapper gentleman was enjoying in his pipe?
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I’d guess that’s a 1913 50th Anniversiary of Gettysburg reunion photo, those men average about seventy and some years of age.
There was another big reunion on the 75th Anniversiary in 1938 but the veterans were all in their middle nineties and older.
642,427 total Union casualties:
110,100 killed in battle; 224,580 diseases; 275,174 wounded.
All my male relatives aged 13-65 on both sides of my family I can research were union veterans during the Civil War, all volunteers.
I’m sixty five. I can’t imagine joining the cavalry, but my grandmother’s grandfather did.
And the old boy lived to be 107 years old, as well.
They were tougher than me, for sure.