The obvious next step had to be military records. But at this point in my research I felt like I had gotten to know these people, and I found myself dreading what I would find.

CSA military records reveal that they had stayed on the farm until well into the war. Perhaps because they were farmers with so many young children, they did not muster into any of the units that were formed near them soon after Fort Sumter -- like the Long Mountain Boys and the Pedlar Guard, mustered nearby in 1861.

When the brothers did enlist, as with so much else in their lives, they did it together. In August 1863, they joined the newly formed Company G of the 1st Engineers Regiment. They would spend most of their time building and repairing roads and bridges. They would not see combat in this regiment, but they would be vulnerable to what killed more soldiers than bullets: disease.

On the last pages of each brother’s military file, their deaths were recorded. And even in death, they were parallel. They succumbed within 11 days of each other: John on September 9, 1864, in Lynchburg, and James on Sept. 20 in Petersburg.  

In one final parallel in the brothers’ lives, both of their widows filed for Virginia state pensions from their husbands’ war service together, on June 18, 1888. Both signed the applications with an X.