Author Inspires New Yorker To Find Two Long Island Towns' War Graves
By Bill Bleyer
Feb./March 2005

HUNTINGTON, N.Y. - Ask Robert Farrell why he decided to track down the name of every Civil War soldier from two Long Island towns and he replies with a laugh that "I don't play golf." A more serious answer is that "I was just getting bored doing nothing."

In fact, Farrell, a 69-year-old Huntington resident who is a member of the North Shore Civil War Round Table, was inspired to tackle the project when he attended one of the group's author lectures last summer.

James Haas was speaking about his book, The Gunner at His Piece, a compilation about the Civil War soldiers from College Point, Queens. "He had done some research and found about 226 people in College Point and I figured that Huntington was much more rural than College Point so we couldn't have had more than a hundred or 150 people. But I kept finding more and more people."

By November, Farrell had learned of more than 1,100 Civil War soldiers from Huntington and Babylon, which used to be part of Huntington. He expects to get to 1,200 before he's done and turns his "Huntington Town Civil War Index Project" into a book. He has also learned where about 240 of the veterans are buried.

Because Huntington had two coasts during the war, on Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean, the veterans he has found include 115 sailors and 3 marines. He believes this is unique to Long Island.

"I've been generally interested in the Civil War and done a lot of reading over the past five or six years," said Farrell, whose great-grandfather served in the conflict. "I started to understand it and realize just how important it was to American history."

When he decided to apply that interest to compiling a list of soldiers, his jumping-off point was the Huntington war memorial building where he found a plaque listing about 40 local Civil War soldiers. As he began to do research, he quickly found names of soldiers who weren't on the plaque. "That caused me to look for more and more," he said.

The retired Grumman Aerospace Corp. executive has spent a lot of time walking through cemeteries peering at tombstones, but most of his research has been done on his computer. As his work progressed, he kept finding new ways to find new names.

After going through census and cemetery records, he developed a list of companies of regiments formed in the area and then went to the web site Civilwardata.com and looked at the "enlisted at" box for those companies and found other names not listed elsewhere. He tracked down an 1890 veterans' census and found additional names. He found other records from GAR posts with still more names.

Farrell said his criteria for inclusion was "if he breathed here or we buried him here, I'm going to list him."

In his final push, Farrell is getting some help from a dozen members of his Civil War round table, who volunteered to walk through cemeteries. One of them was the group's president, Andrew Athanas, who said he and his wife explored three Northport cemeteries and found about 27 graves, "not all of which were marked as Civil War veterans."

Athanas added that "I think this is a terrific project for our roundtable to get involved with for a number of reasons. In exploring these local cemeteries, I found myself getting immersed in the history of my community."

He said the index they hope to help create will be an excellent resource for those doing genealogical research. In addition, "Graves that are not properly marked can be identified and veteran badges can be placed next to the headstones."

Athanas, a retired history teacher, said he was interested to learn that there were a number of black veterans in the Amityville Cemetery who had served with U.S. Colored Troops regiments. George Washington Brush, a Huntington resident buried in Huntington Rural Cemetery, received the Medal of Honor as an officer commanding black troops.

"A lot of them are buried locally," Farrell said of the soldiers identified. "But I got an e-mail giving me somedetailed information on someone who's buried in Anaheim Cemetery in Orange County, California. A lot of them are in national cemeteries. I just learned that somebody is buried in a national cemetery in Milwaukee."

Farrell continued, "If you reach out, people will help you." He said volunteer researchers around the country have helped research local cemetery records for him. He asks that anyone who knows of any Civil War soldiers from the two towns contact him at bobfarrell@Verizon.net.

He hopes to finish the project by April, saying, "I'd like to put it out for the 140th anniversary of the end of the war."

His local Congressman, Steve Israel, a member of the round table and co-chairman of the House Civil War Caucus, has agreed to donate $1,000 of his own money so Farrell can publish his information for local libraries and historical societies. Farrell then plans to publish his results as a paperback book for wider distribution.

Among the more interesting veterans Farrell has researched is Fred Mather of the 7th New York Heavy Artillery, who was a pioneer in the early conservation movement and creation of fish hatcheries after the war. He was captured at Petersburg and got his sword back 25 years later by writing to the widow of the Confederate veteran who had obtained it.

Then there is Pvt. Luther S. Ketcham of the 48th New York Infantry. He was captured July 18, 1863, at Fort Wagner, S.C., and died a prisoner of war at Belle Island, Va. At a time when brothers often served in the same companies, a private named Ira P. Ketcham served in this same regiment. Farrell believes the two men were related, but is still investigating how.