WHO ARE THEY?
The Amos Humiston story resonates like few others from Gettysburg. On July 1, 1863—Day 1 of the epic, threeday battle—a local resident discovered the body of the 154th New York Infantry sergeant near John Kuhn’s brickyard, north of the town square. The soldier clutched in his hand an image of three children. He carried no identification.
To identify the children and thus reveal the soldier’s name, a doctor had hundreds of cartesde-visite of the photograph created and distributed. “Whose Father Was He?” read the headline above a story about the image in The Philadelphia Inquirer and other Northern newspapers. The publicity effort worked. Months after the battle, Humiston’s widow identified him after reading a detailed description of the photograph of the children in a religious publication.
But the Humiston saga wasn’t the only mystery involving Gettysburg photographs. In the immediate aftermath of the battle, burial crews discovered other poignant images—a torn portrait of a fiancée, a blood-spattered image in a captain’s stiff fingers, a baby’s likeness smeared with blood, and many others—among bodies, bibles, scraps of letters, clothing, and weaponry.
In November 1867, a daguerreotype of a woman—in her early 20s with “dark hair, combed back and falling loosely over her shoulders”—was unearthed, along with a soldier’s remains and a cartridge box containing 43 bullet, near the Emmitsburg Road at Gettysburg Based on the location on the battlefield, the grave was believed to belong to a fallen Confederate. As one newspaper reported: “We have been particular
