Behind the Lines

By William C. Davis · Originally published July-August 2025 · pp. 4–5

Behind the Lines By William C. Davis

My interest in history originated when I got interested in genealogy at a very early age, about 10 or 11. Knowing that I had ancestors who landed at Jamestown in 1608, or lived in western Missouri in the days of Bleeding Kansas, made me want to know more about the times in which they lived and the experiences they would have had. A couple of distant Virginia and Maryland ancestors were small slaveowners. Another in Ohio was a Republican abolitionist. Many were Quakers. And, of course, a few served in the Civil War. Combine that with the fact that my interest began in the days preceding the Civil War Centennial, and it seemed destiny that I would develop a passion for the history of our most turbulent era. In those days—the early 1960s—for someone living in Northern California, researching a Civil War ancestor involved writing letters to clerks of Eastern county courts, local and state historical societies, state archives, and so on. Answers could take weeks, usually with the response that nothing was found, or replies did not come at all. Living relatives knew little if anything, and sometimes what they “knew” turned out to be part faulty memory, and part imagination, like my Missouri grandmother who was proud of her Confederate heritage, unaware that her grandfather was a Union cavalryman in the 11th Missouri Cavalry, and that he and his family were Democrats who supported Lincoln in the 1860 election! Still, I learned things in time. That cavalryman spent his war patrolling the Missouri-Kansas borderland chasing Confederate guerrillas, most notably William Clarke Quantrill and “Bloody Bill” Anderson. His aged father served in the Independence Home Guard during Sterling Price’s 1864 raid to the Missouri River. There were Confederates, too, on my grandfather’s side, a couple in the Carroll County, Virginia, Home Guard, and greatgreat-grandfather Josiah Davis, a 40-year-old soldier in the 45th Virginia Infantry, who saw only two battles, Cloyd’s Mountain in May 1864, and then Piedmont in June, where he was captured and sent to a Union prison camp. Exchanged in February 1865, he came home with a debilitating disease that killed him on April 7, just days before the end of the war in the Old Dominion. Today, thanks to the internet and the incalculable amount of material that has been digitized and stored in databases, the research I did over the years could all be accomplished in a matter of hours today. For all that many of my generation—including me—bemoan the inconveniences and intrusion of computers and the net, what they offer

to researchers is on the order of the miraculous. Ancestry. com alone is a phenomenon no one could have imagined in the 1960s. Its televised advertising is ubiquitous. Indeed, I expect it to have its own network before long. Massive searchable databases of old newspapers open millions

Josiah Davis’ record in the National Archives. Davis was a private in Company E, 45th Regiment Virginia Infantry and was captured on June 5, 1864, at Piedmont, Virginia.

of pages of papers that can be searched at the push of a button. Archives have digitized ever-growing mountains of historical letters and diaries, and an uncountable number of books and journal articles are online and searchable as well. Genealogy has even become television entertainment on PBS with Henry Louis Gates’ popular “Finding Your Roots,” which weekly combines celebrities with their ancestors. What this abundant wealth of material means is that the search is not only almost as fast as the speed of light, but it can also search wider, opening unexpected avenues. For instance: Josiah Davis’s wife was Sarah Lundy. Her line ran back to New Jersey and Robert Stockton. He was a man of minor distinction, but his brother—my distant uncle– Richard was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. A nephew of his—and therefore a distant cousin with a couple of removals, was Union Major General David Hunter. I’m not too thrilled about that since I have always regarded Hunter as perhaps the ugliest of all Union generals and a man of dubious character! Then there was Sarah Davis’s mother’s family, the Kesters of Grayson County. Their line goes back to an immigrant from Holland named Paulus Kuster. After a generation or two, they changed their surname to Custer, and, yes, you guessed it, General George Armstrong Custer is another cousin. I’m no more thrilled about that than I am about Hunter, but we can’t choose our ancestors. Still, knowing about them, or the Ohio abolitionist Ira Hawkins, or Captain John Hawkins of Massachusetts and

Ensign David Lee of the 2d Continental Light Dragoons in the Revolution, helps breathe life into the times and events through which they lived. Adults can be colossal bores about their ancestors. Just ask the commendable people who work in the research rooms at the National Archives who deal day in and day out with these “genies.” Still, I strongly urge parents who want their children to come to know and understand our past as Americans, to expose their children to genealogy. By learning who their ancestors were, they might just be caught up in curiosity about their likes and times. Of course, it isn’t possible for everyone to trace lineage back to the 1600s, but the great majority of us can go back at least a few generations, and at every stop on the way there will have been something going on in America that can capture the imagination of youth, and that is where the learning begins.

William C. Davis was managing editor, then editor,

then publisher of Civil War Times Illustrated from 1969

to 1990. He is the author or editor of more than 50 books in Civil War and Southern history, and former director of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia

Tech, where he served as professor of history until 2013. His most recent book is The Whartons’ War: The Civil War Correspondence of General Gabriel C. Wharton and Anne Radford Wharton, 1863–1865, co-edited with Sue Heth Bell.