The Search

Text below is from the Gettysburg 140th Anniversary Commemorative Issue of The Baltimore Sun, Sunday, August 2, 2004

Family rediscovers the life of a soldier

Remembrance: In different ways, the Ingrams are recalling the perilous Civil War experiences of their ancestor, James Kinsella
By Luciana Lopez Sun Staff
August 3, 2003

When Margaret Ingram was a girl, she heard stories about her great-grandfather, about his Irish brogue, about his being wounded, perhaps at Gettysburg, about his time as a policeman in Baltimore.

But in 1991, her daughter, Susan, began working as part of the camera crew on the movie “Gettysburg.” There, re-creating the three-day engagement, which resulted in more than 50,000 dead, wounded and missing men in the two armies, Susan felt something of the horror of the battle where her ancestor James Kinsella fought.

“She was moved,” Margaret said. “She thought of him being there.”

From that experience came a deeper interest in the Baltimore family’s Civil War ancestor for Margaret and Susan’s brother, Bruce.

Mother and son each began reconstructing Kinsella’s life. Margaret took an academic route, tracking Kinsella through the traces he left in history; Bruce, after visiting a re-enactment of Antietam, became a re-enactor, joining his great-great-grandfather’s unit and experiencing, in some small measure, the life Kinsella must have led.

Margaret discovered Kinsella’s unit when, on a visit to Susan at Gettysburg, she found her ancestor’s name on the Pennsylvania monument.

Now that she knew he was in the 71st Philadelphia Volunteers (also known as the California Regiment), Margaret could send for Kinsella’s records, a park ranger explained. Those documents tracked Kinsella from his enlistment in 1861 through his discharge in 1921 from a home for disabled volunteer soldiers, just more than a week before his death.

The papers Margaret received traced, in heavy type and florid longhand script, the precarious route Kinsella trod, brushing by death time and again.

He was wounded at Antietam (not, as Margaret had heard, at Gettysburg) on Sept. 17, 1862; from late that year to early 1863, he was in a hospital in Baltimore. “He was lucky,” Margaret said. “He lay overnight on a field, wounded, and he survived.”

His luck held at Gettysburg, too. Captured by the Confederates on July 3, he went to a prison in Richmond, Va. Again, he survived.

More information was found when Margaret inherited the family Bible. The book contained original documents; the military records from Washington had only been copies.

Here were his original muster roll, and his honorable discharge, their Gothic letters and slanting script from Nov. 14, 1864.

Dated only four days earlier was his naturalization certificate, proclaiming the man from County Wicklow, Ireland, who immigrated to the United States in 1850 at the tail end of the potato famine, the man who had fought to keep his new country whole, was now an American citizen.

And with the Bible was also a picture of the heavy-mustachioed Kinsella, wearing his old police uniform in Baltimore, where he settled after the Civil War to raise a family that would stay in and around the city for at least four more generations.

Bruce had not yet gotten in as deep as his mother, who was slowly piecing together Kinsella’s life. But last year, Bruce and Susan visited the re-enactment of Antietam, where they caught up with the people role-playing as Kinsella’s old unit, the 71st Philadelphia Volunteers.

“After that, I was so impressed, I figured I’d gear up for Gettysburg,” Bruce said.

He put together a uniform: the rough leather shoes, the light blue wool pants and the darker blue wool jacket, the flexible hat soldiers sometimes filled with food gathered along the way (and therefore called a forage cap).

He put the uniform into practice at a re-enactment in Pennsylvania, a non-battle event much like training, Bruce said. It was cold and raining, and Bruce, sleeping outdoors in a tent, spent an uncomfortable night. But then, Bruce said, he realized that Kinsella would have experienced something very similar.

Both the subsequent re-enactments Bruce went to were rained out. Although he has been to three events, he has not participated in a large-scale battle; unlike his great-great-grandfather, Gettysburg will be his first.

To understand the battle better, Bruce said he plans to walk to the re-enactment site from a point about eight miles away, trying to re-create some of the same march Kinsella must have done. He wants to get the feel of it, he said, a taste of what Kinsella would have endured, laden with a backpack, knapsack, musket and ammunition, traveling by foot across a country trying to stay in one piece. Gaps remain in the Ingrams’ knowledge of Kinsella.

How did he get to Baltimore after the war ended? Was his relocation perhaps related to Hannah Moffett, the Baltimore girl he married in 1867? And how did he become a policeman? And what about one of the more roundabout clues Kinsella left, a note addressed to him at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad – did he, like so many others since the railroad’s first stone was laid in 1828, once work at the B&O?

But Bruce is looking for something closer to what Kinsella went though.

Margaret hopes to add those answers to the scrapbook she has assembled on her great-grandfather. Inside the book’s clear sleeves she keeps the documents she has collected, photos of Gettysburg, snapshots of her son in his Union uniform. They are the bits of a 19th- century life, distilled into a few slight – but still revealing – remnants.

And Bruce has more work to do, too. His portrayal of Kinsella’s capture at Gettysburg was delayed this year when the re-enactment was postponed because of heavy rains.

He still traveled to Gettysburg on July 3 and met a few Confederate re-enactors who symbolically captured him.
“I’m paying tribute to my great-great-grandfather,” said Bruce. “It’s hard to think about him, because I didn’t know him.

But to say I’m representing him means something.”

Copyright 2003, The Baltimore Sun