This is the promised continuation of last week's post on MacKinlay Kantor's Andersonville.

There are several people in my family tree who have taken particularly strong hold of my imagination. There are the famine immigrants, whose origins in Ireland I will probably never know because their son--my great grandfather--kept no records and told no stories and apparently sought assiduously to shed the past as he assimilated himself as far as a devoted, mass-every-morning Catholic could assimilate in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. There are the numerous wanna-be gold miners in Colorado and California--one of whom hit the mother lode, only to lose his wealth as quickly as he gained it through bad investments and big spending (to celebrate his strike, he commissioned a train to take him and his friends on an all-expense-paid, luxury joyride from Denver to California). There is the great-great aunt who made a splash during the twenties and thirties as a writer of westerns--published, in order to avoid the nuisance of censorious judgment, under a variant of her cattle-ranching husband's name. There is the Dutch ancestor who was awarded a large farm in western Pennsylvania for distinguished service in the Revolutionary War. There is the Scottish ancestor who moved his family across the river separating Kentucky from Ohio and slave territory from free, in order to liberate his slaves. And there is David Sells, who, as I mentioned in my earlier post, fought for the Union during the Civil War until he was captured at Chickamauga, and then slowly starved to death during his tenure at three successive Confederate prison camps.

We have a uniformed photograph of David Sells, and a letter he wrote home before he was captured. In the photo he is baby-faced, beardless and wide-eyed. He appears to be small; his shoulders still have the narrowness of a boy's, and his chest is anything but broad. He looks too kind to be a soldier, and too young to have anything to do with the killing fields where the conflict between north and south was so bloodily settled (Chickamauga alone claimed almost 35,000 Union and Confederate casualties). In other words, David Sells looks just like countless other old boys and young men of his generation must have looked just before they marched off to war--before they knew what they were in for, before the fantasy of military glory and fighting for principle faded into a grisly and endlessly demeaning struggle just to stay alive. His letter home speaks, with touching misspellings and creepy prescience, of how well he and his company are treated. He particularly praises the food.

The story of David Sells had been passed down from my great-great grandmother--his sister--to my great-grandmother (her daughter), and then on down through my grandmother to my mother to me. Somewhere along the line the story got warped, as family stories so often do, and David was remembered as a brother my great-grandmother knew rather than as an uncle she only ever knew of. According to the story, this brother of hers had survived Andersonville, and had gone on to become a beloved and integral elder in his extended family.

It was not until my mother and I started chasing records this summer that we got the story straight. What our family had not remembered properly, the government had at least recorded accurately. Online databases gave us his regiment, his proper name (because we had the generation wrong, we had the surname wrong, too), his enlistment date, his date of capture, his progression through several camps, and his cause and date of death at Florence Stockade. They also informed us that no one knows where he was buried, that his was an unmarked, lost grave.

How do you find someone who has been twice lost--once by his country, and a second time by his own family? What do you really know about him from a letter and a photo and a small, sadly generic collection of facts? What can you know? It's the grand conundrum of historiography writ small, as genealogy.

The story of David Sells turned out to be the story of how David Sells was forgotten--ironically in the act of being remembered. This made me think a lot about how closely connected stories are to memories--how the one is needed for the other, but can entirely distort and displace the other, too. Finding out how fictionalized our family history of David Sells had accidentally become also created in me a desire for stories that would help me imagine what it was like for David to inhabit the facts that defined his final months of life.

And so I came to Andersonville. I knew about this novel the way I knew about a number of books--I had stared at its spine countless times as a child perusing her parents' bookshelves, looking for something to read. White paperback spine with gold raised type; yellowed pages and minuscule print. I had tried to read it more than once, and had been defeated each time: first, as a girl, by the complexity of the prose; later, as an adult thinking the book might make good bedtime reading, by the sheer historical density of the thing, its utter embeddedness in the world of Sumter County, Georgia during the mid-1860s; still later, as an older adult with chronic eyestrain, by the punishingly tiny print on the book's yellowed pages. Somehow Andersonville came with me when I moved out of my parents' house, and it migrated unread from apartment to apartment and state to state as I progressed from college through graduate school to work. Winnowing my ever-unwieldy library several years ago, I finally pitched Andersonville, not as a dud of a book, but as one whose typeface mandated that i would never read it.

I remembered Andersonville this summer, and ordered a copy with larger print in the hope that the book would help me in my search for David Sells. More on how that went, soon.

to be continued

I have a hazy recollection from reading 'Andersonville' decades ago. In it the prisoners, to kill time, competed in solving some mathematical problems that in today's school systems would be attacked as brutally difficult and oppressive, to say the least. Can anyone confirm the existence of the passage?