In March of 2022, I took a very chilly excursion to Gettysburg with my dad. This was a very special event for me, not because it was my first visit to Gettysburg, though it was the first one I remembered (why my family insisted on dragging my four-year-old self to battlefields, I do not know). Although I still intended to make the most out of my Civil War nerdiness, it had a much more personal goal. I wanted to trace the steps of my great-great-grandfather, Calvin Dixon, of the 148th Pennsylvania Volunteer Regiment. 

Growing up, I had no idea that I had an ancestor (actually multiple, because there are two more on my dad’s side) who fought in the Civil War. In 2023, 1860 seems like a very long time ago, but in reality, it was only four or five generations ago. My parents, born in the ’60s, met people during their lifetimes who were born in the 19th century. This is when it comes in handy to have an older relative interested in family history, because people generally don’t put much thought into remembering an uncle they met once in their childhood, or the details of their grandmother’s life. My great-uncle Boyd, unfortunately, died before I was born, but his love for writing newsletters helped me in my own genealogy journey. He would have gone to a physical library to search through microfilm to find Calvin Dixon on the 1862 muster roll; I was lucky enough to encounter it in a digitized form.

A muster roll is a very useful document for military ancestors because it has several pieces of information associated with it. I can conclude Calvin’s age at enlistment (21), where he enlisted (Brookville, although the regiment was assembled in Harrisburg), his company (“I”), and his regiment (the 148th Pennsylvania Infantry). His presence in the 148th Pennsylvania is significant because it marks him as a volunteer rather than a drafted soldier, and also because the 148th, like many other regiments of the Civil War, created a record of their wartime experience. The story of our regiment; a history of the 148th Pennsylvania vols., written by the comrades., available on the Library of Congress website, provided an invaluable resource for me in tracing Calvin’s journey. Although his was not one of the accounts recorded, the perspectives of his fellow soldiers provide a vivid description of the regiment’s campaigns, from muster at Harrisburg, to the Battle of Gettysburg, all the way to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Additionally, Calvin’s name does appear in the book, in a story of how he captured a “Reb” at Gettysburg.

Seeing Calvin’s name (circled in green) on the monument dedicated to the 148th was a deeply fulfilling experience for me, because it drove home the fact that genealogy isn’t just sifting through censuses and tax lists, it’s also the act of encountering the physical presence the people of the past still have in our world.