After reading the brothers’ military files I took an evening walk through the George Place, stopping by the tumbledown chimney where George had lived. Before, the youth I had envisioned for him here had been idyllic, with a chestnut-beamed house, barn, sheep, and wheat field, with a passel of brothers and cousins .

But it had not been idyllic; I had been missing the defining feature of George’s youth. His father and uncle, men with parallel lives, had died parallel deaths in the Civil War when he was 7 years old. George had to grow up very fast, and life on the farm must have been very hard.

The 1880 census shows the family still working the farm together, except for one brother. Neither Lucy nor Martha ever remarried.

 In 1893, James’s land was divided into two lots and sons George and James drew lots for them. James then sold his lot to George, at which point it truly became “the George Place.”