➡️ Help history. 2 minutes for 7 questions 🫡

We host Chris Mowery of YouTube’s Vlogging Through History on Talk With History, discussing his path from history major to youth ministry, then pivoting during COVID to popular reaction videos and full-time content creation.

Chris shares how his genealogy background led to a 500-page book, Trumbull County Boys, focused on Company H of the 20th Ohio and his ancestor Sam Hughes, using extensive primary sources like letters, newspapers, journals, sketches, and National Archives records.

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🎥 Vlogging Through History on YouTube

00:00 Meet Chris Mowery

01:19 From Ministry to YouTube

03:12 Writing the Company H Book

04:54 Hidden Stories in Records

06:14 Finding Sam Hughes

08:11 Shiloh Burials and Disease

10:51 Scout Stories and Lore

15:40 Civil War Journals Sketches and Letters

20:08 Last Minute Discoveries

21:43 What Research Changed

22:46 Wagoner Ammo Run

24:53 Archives Research

28:20 Pension Files Stories

29:44 Battlefield Travel Insights

33:12 Duval Family Letter

37:12 Book Title and Release Date

🎥 Video version of this podcast

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All right, so we are joined by Chris Mowery here on Talk With History, you

guys as Jen, if you haven't watched our video yet and you're coming onto

this podcast video a little bit later, um, Jen jokingly says in a video where

she's recording with Chris at Shiloh.

She jokingly introduces vlogging through history and she says, you probably

know vlogging through history, you're probably just learning about us.

So again, you probably know vlogging through history from his channel on

YouTube and, and our kind of our history content creator circle that we are in.

We're on, uh, each other's videos every once in a while.

Very happy to have Chris.

We had the opportunity to go out and meet Chris, Jen did out at Shiloh.

So we live in Tennessee, the Memphis area.

Chris is doing some kind of final wrap up research and, uh,

a tour,

a tour, uh, out at Shiloh, but also took the opportunity to, to

go out there and show Jen where a couple of his ancestors are buried.

So Chris, thank you so much for joining us here on Talk With History, our podcast.

Um, so tell us a little bit about yourself.

You don't have to talk too much about vlogging through history.

Again, hopefully this is your audience watching, watching

our video and our, our audience already who already knows you, but.

Tell us about, a little bit about your channel, kind of what drove

you to write this book that's possibly available right now.

I know you have some more details on that, and then the, the trip out to Shiloh.

Yeah, so, um, I, uh, majored in history in college, but ended up

going into youth ministry instead.

Um, I know you're a PK yourself, so Yeah,

yeah, yeah,

yeah.

Oh yeah.

My kids can relate to you having grown up in that.

But, uh, I, uh, I didn't youth ministry for 14 years.

Full time.

And then I actually for the last 10 years have been a speaker for an organization

called Rachel's Challenge, which uh, uh, was founded by one of the con victims.

And we share Rachel's story.

Uh, she was a person who was known for going out of her way to show

kindness and compassion to people.

And so we share her story as a way to encourage students to do that.

And since I was kind of traveling.

Like part of the year, but then only for about nine months every year I was

looking for something else to do and I fell back to my history background and,

uh, started making gaming videos, uh, on a channel called The History Guy.

And I would talk about the history behind whatever game I was playing.

And, you know, I was playing a game about Gettysburg.

I talk about the Battle of Gettysburg, that kind of stuff.

That morphed into doing a channel that was dedicated to like what you

guys, you go to a historic site, talk about what happened there.

At least that was the plan part of vlogging through history and

right about the time I set up that channel, COVID happened,

and so now I wasn't traveling and

mm-hmm.

You know, when you're speaking to large audiences in a confined space for a

living, that's not happening during COVID.

So someone suggested that I start.

Doing reaction videos from my home to other people's history content while

we waited for travel to open Olympics.

So I did that and it became super popular and, you know, hit a hundred

thousand subscribers in like three months and haven't looked back.

Been doing it full time ever since.

Uh, over time I started thinking about other things I could be doing

that I was working for myself and the idea of a book up and I decided to.

Fall back onto another thing that I, uh, am very comfortable

with, which is family history.

And so I decided to write a book initially about, uh, the 20th Ohio volunteers

because that was a regiment that my, I had an ancestor in my fifth great grandfather

and they were in all the major battles and we theater under Grant Sherman.

And then as I started digging into the story, I realized there was

so much there that I could really.

Zero in on one single company.

And so I wrote just about Sam's Company, Sam, my ancestor, Sam Hughes, uh,

and, and wrote a whole 500 page book, just about one company of 130 guys.

And that's how we got here.

No, I, I love it.

And that's one of the things you know, is just before we started the recording

here, you know, Jen was telling you, Hey.

Chris just heads up, Scott's not the history guy.

Right?

Um, so Jen's got her her graduate degree in, in history.

But one of the things as I've been on this journey in diving deeper

and deeper into, into history with, you know, folks like obviously with

Jen and with folks like you, is.

How much there is to learn about one unit, one company, one battle.

I mean, they, there's whole channels and podcasts and industries just around

Gettysburg, you know, and that's one of the things that I found so fascinating.

So the fact that you wrote a 500 page book, you know,

just on, on this, this unit.

Yeah.

I'm not surprised by what I've learned as I've kind of just been diving deeper

down the, the history rabbit hole.

Yeah, so interesting.

Just to give you an example of what's out there when you start digging into

a topic is, uh, when I looked, looked at the 20th Ohio, and you look at their

regimental history, it has this one entry where it says that they did Garrison, duke

Boulevard, Tennessee for a couple months.

Right?

So you guys know it's not too far from you.

Yeah, and that's all it said.

It just said they were Garrison.

But as I dug into that.

I found this incredible story about a day that a 6,000 man Confederate cavalry

raid threatened the union supply lines at Bolivar and the 20th Ohio, along

with elements of two other regiments.

About a thousand guys went out.

Fought for seven hours against 6,000 cavalry, six to one odds

and And won and drove them off.

Wow.

And none of that was in the regimen history.

It just said Garrison duty at Boulevard.

But in that sentence, there was all these incredible stories about stuff

that was going on during that little fights that nobody knows anything about.

So that's one of the things that I'm able to do with this book is to expand

on those sentences and turning them into entire chapters of the book, telling, like

you said, stories and been tapped into.

And that's so you could do this a thousand times over and still not

scratch the surface of the civil War.

Yeah.

So Chris, when did you first hear about this ancestor of yours?

Like was this like a childhood story you grew up with?

No, actually.

Nobody in my family knew about him.

Um, it, it was one of those things where I was a senior in high school and I got

introduced for family history by my best friend's dad and I started, and because

the war was one of my main interests, one of the first things I did or try

to find out how many of my ancestors fought in the Civil War, and I have

this kind of absurd number compared.

You know, I've researched the family histories of hundreds of people.

Wow.

And I've never found anyone who had as many Civil war direct ancestors as I do.

I'm talking like great-great-great grandfathers right after 13.

Yeah.

Uh, that's

a lot.

Yeah.

My ex-wife has one one.

Oh, that's,

I,

that's a

lot more normal.

I think I have, I might have one.

You probably have more.

I may have.

Oh my gosh.

I may.

But the thing is, and what people don't realize is that most of the

men who fought in the Civil War.

Didn't fight at Gettysburg, didn't fight at Gica, Maga, or mm-hmm.

V or Vicksburg.

They were, you know, in eastern Kentucky fighting against Confederate

gorillas for the entire war, you know?

Yeah.

They were on Garrison duty at some port that never saw any action.

Uh, yeah.

So that's the, the story from o people.

And so what drew me to Sam Hughes then was that he was one of those

guys who was in all of those big battles in the Western theater.

Um, he was at Shiloh.

Vicksburg and Atlanta and, uh, Chattanooga and Ken Strong,

and then the March to the Sea.

So I think that was why I was on so much to his story, because he experienced a lot

of what we learned about the Civil War.

Yeah.

He could be in a movie, make a movie outta him.

Well, my friend jd, who I know you guys know from the history underground

to keep wanting it to be turned into a TV series, but he hasn't

read it yet, so he's gonna get his copy in a couple days in Gettysburg.

Nice.

I'm gonna bring you guys one too.

Oh,

thank you.

Yes, yes.

We're looking forward to seeing you.

So tell me, Chris, like when we went to Shiloh, there was a group

of the 20th Ohio buried at Shiloh.

Is that the biggest group of the 20th Ohio in one location buried together?

Yes, by far.

Um, there are not, now that I've done the math, I think there are 40 guys from

the 20th Ohio buried at that cemetery.

Wow.

And as near as I could tell, 39 of them died of disease.

Yeah, one item, battle 39 of

disease one.

One was killed in the Battle of Shiloh.

Uh, and, and over the course of the war, uh, the 20th Ohio

had 360 deaths, which ranks it.

One of the deadliest units in Ohio, Ohio had, um, per capita, more men serve

in the Civil War than any other state.

Uh, and the unit that had the most deaths had 365.

There was one with 360 3 and then the 20th, Ohio was third out of 200 regiments

with 360, 270 of those were from disease.

Yeah.

And that, that's the story of the Western Theater, though, especially.

Yes.

These units that were camped out at Shiloh for months, that that was a

disease factory, that, that location, because you got the swamp there and, uh,

it was just, it was miserable and, uh,

miserable.

Yeah.

It ended up just killing more guys in that one place in the couple

months they were there than did it.

And more, more men will die from disease than battle in the Civil War anyway.

Yeah.

So it's just a good example of that,

right?

Yeah.

And that, and that's kind of the standard two to one, three to one, uh mm-hmm.

Disease deaths versus battle deaths.

Company age, which is the company I wrote about, is this weird

anomaly in that, in that Yes.

Um, their battle deaths and their disease deaths are identical, which,

yeah.

And we talked about this on the video.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So,

yeah.

They, I did the math.

They had 15% of the regiment's battle deaths.

They had 5% of the regiment's, disease deaths.

And I've got a lot of theories on that.

One of which is that that company came from a different part of Ohio than all

the other companies in the regiment.

I don't know if there's something about bringing and their back.

Sure.

And that kind of, the other thing is that I know that a lot of those

guys, when they got sick, that were sent home on furlough to recover.

Mm. Instead of being kept in a military hospital.

And I think maybe that helped too.

I don't know if the other companies did that as much as the, as company H did.

That's awesome.

So 500 pages, what, there's always something that you're

like, oh my gosh, this is amazing.

So what was the thing that you like, oh my gosh, I have to tell this like this.

Oh yeah, this makes the hair on my arm stand up.

Like, tell me that.

So when, when I first started researching the book, I found out

pretty early that the primary.

Behind the lines scout for the entire army of the Tennessee.

The guy that Grant and Sherman used more than anybody was a guy

in company age of the 20th Ohio.

Oh.

Name was Lorraine Ruges.

And he wrote a book in 1865 about his experience.

And it was, it had endorsements, uh, like, you know, letters of endorsement

from Grant Sherman, Legett mc person.

All these guys that in high command who basically said, if we had a tough job,

Ruggles is the guy we asked to do it.

Holy

cow.

Um, and he wrote all of these incredible, like, little stories that

would've been impossible to tell about this company if I hadn't found it.

Like, uh, he tells a story from Camp Chase or from, uh, camp King, which

is where they were stationed up outta Kentucky in, uh, the winter of 61,

62, about this woman who rides by, in a carriage, a civilian shouts out the

window at them or offer Jeff Davis.

And here they are defending Northern Kentucky and this woman's cheering

for the Confederate president, so

mm-hmm.

Uh, Ruges tells the story about some unknown unidentified union soldiers

who that night showed up at her house, stole all her chickens, and he heavily

implies that it was him and a group of guys from company H that did it.

But.

He never admitted to.

Yeah.

He's like,

I

don't

know.

I heard through the

grapevine that,

that's awesome.

Yeah, and he, and he tells the story about manning force, who was at the

time, their lieutenant colonel who showed up the next day and this woman came to

camp to complain, showed up and was like inspecting all their tents and looking for

chicken bones and rug was basically said.

The people, whoever did it, did a great job of hiding because

there was no evidence whatsoever.

And so little stories like that.

And he tells a story about one time that he was behind enemy lines and

he was trying to get his hands on a confederate colonel's uniform.

And he found the body of a Confederate colonel.

And when he lifted it up to try and take the, uh, the uniform off, he let out this

when this air released, freaked him out.

And he said that.

Last time I tried to get a Confederate Colonel's uniform.

Oh my gosh.

Oh my gosh,

that's so

crazy.

Like little things like that that just really add life to the story of company

H that I wouldn't have been able to find and, and finding that book and I

have it on my shelf, was just a treasure that really made all the difference.

That is a treasure now.

He's your, almost like your dick winters.

Yeah.

'cause you have so much about him.

Um, where's he buried at?

So

Lorraine Ruges is buried in Michigan of all places.

Really?

Oh wow.

Uh, there's a lot of these guys who ended up in the west.

I mean, there's guys buried in like Nebraska and, uh, California and Oregon.

Um, even my, in my own family.

Uh, so my fifth great grandfather who unfortunately we don't know

where he's buried, he's in an unknown grave here locally somewhere,

died in 1868, right after the war.

Uh, his son was the last living.

Survivor of company H and he died in Oregon in 1935.

So yeah,

all that westward.

He was the drummer expansion after the war.

Yeah, he was a drummer.

Very cool.

Well, and and it's, that's so neat to hear you say that too, that you kind of found,

you know, Ruges and kind of all, all these short stories that he wrote because

we've had the opportunity to interview a few book authors, you know, over the

course of the past couple years and.

That's actually like a semi common trend behind books that make it to light.

It's somebody who discovers this little treasure trove of information.

That then you're like, oh my gosh, this is amazing.

I need to, I need to help share these stories and this is gonna help

me create the context around this other story that I had started with.

And I discovered this other thing.

I think it was the Jeep Show.

Mm-hmm.

One in, uh, there was some enlisted kind of entertainment specialist

that was traveling with Mickey Rooney back in the day, during World War ii.

And he had written down a bunch of his experiences and all that stuff.

And that was one of the, one of the.

A book that he put together that he gave to his family, that his daughter

published, and then this guy found it and he wrote a book about it.

And so similar thing that you're doing with starting off with this story of,

you know, this unit out of Ohio, and then you discover, you know, hey, they

were just on guard duty over here.

Nope.

There was a whole lot more, you know, behind that for, for their garrison duty.

Oh, and by the way, here's this scout that everybody.

Relied on and oh, I discovered, you know, all this stuff that he's writing.

And so that to me, that's a, that's a hallmark for those listening or

watching of what's bound to be a good book because there's, that's

primary source material right there.

Yeah.

Like life is so often stranger than fiction and more exciting.

And that's a, that's a good note, right?

I mean that's, to me, that's, that's gonna be, I think something that

really brings your book to life.

Yeah.

And that's.

Primary source material is what really is the bulk of this book.

Uh, one of the other things Edward down to was the captain who commanded

the company for a good bit of the war.

Wrote letters home to the local newspaper all the time, and I've got

all of those letters from the newspaper.

Other guys, enlisted men, wrote letters home to the newspaper.

I ended up finding letters that are in existence.

Like that are owned by family members that I was able to track down

and, and get just little details.

Like there was a guy, Franklin Rickard, who wrote a letter on New

Year's Day 1862 home, giving all the details about what they were eating

in camp and what the experience was like, and he died three months later.

He wrote that letter and so,

wow.

One of the things that I tried to do is, you know, we all love Band of Brothers.

I think what attracted people to Band of Brothers was that element of.

It's not telling the story of the whole war from the top down, talking about

generals and divisions moving on a map.

It's a single company of guys that we followed from the time they started

training through the end of the war.

And we were even interested in learning what they did after the war because

we got connected to these guys and we wanted to know their stories.

When one of 'em died, we felt it.

Yeah.

And that's what I wanted with this story.

And so for example, in the chapter about their training in campaign.

Franklin Rickard is very heavily involved because of that letter that

he wrote and I'm introducing them.

And then the next chapter, boom.

Oh by the way, he died, uh, at Shiloh.

Uh, you know, he was one of those guys who died of illness, uh, in

late March at Pittsburgh Landing.

Uh, and so right away it's like that gut punch of uh, uh, getting connected

to this guy and reading this letter he wrote to his parents, and oh, he

died before he ever fired a shot.

Oh, man.

Um, and one of the other people who I relied on walk was a guy

named Henry Dwight, who was.

He was born in Constantinople, Turkey.

Oh, wow.

His parents were missionaries.

They were New England missionaries, and he came home in 1860,

had never been in the us.

Grew up in Turkey, comes to Ohio in 1860 to attend Ohio Wesleyan University to

get a a degree, and the war breaks out.

And he enlists in the 20th Ohio.

He is a sergeant within a month.

And within a couple months after that, it's right around the time of

Fort Donaldson, he gets a Battlefield Commission to Second Lieutenant and he's

transferred in company H And not only did he keep a journal during the entire

war, but he also did hundreds of sketches and had photographs in his journal.

Oh wow.

And so, for example, I'll just show you one of them right here.

Yeah.

Um, this is a sketch.

I don't know how clear it's gonna get.

Lemme try to zoom in and then, um, it's kind of hard to see, but Yeah.

Um.

There you go.

Uh,

gotta buy the book.

So this is a sketch that he made of the confederate bodies piled

up in front of their earthworks after the Battle of Atlanta.

Oh my gosh.

And, um, I'll give you another one here from, or Donaldson, their first experience

with the war comes when they are called into the field for the Battle of Fort

Donaldson, and they're coming down on the.

By the way, here's Lorraine Les.

We talked earlier.

Oh, cool.

Oh, cool.

Try to Yeah.

Give you a little view of him.

I know.

There we go.

There we go.

Yep.

Oh, that's

awesome.

Um,

definitely an actor could play him.

He's got a Christian,

they're coming down on these Steamboats, uh, down the river, uh,

the river or up the river toward where Donaldson, they hear the gunfire,

but they don't see anything, and then they come around the corner.

Around the bend in the river and they see the gunboats firing on Fort Donaldson and,

and Dwight do a scratch of that moment.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

So these, these little things like that that, you know, you can

try and imagine in your mind what they saw, or I can just show you.

Here's a guy in the company who drew what they saw, and it just brings

it to life in a really cool way.

I think.

Oh, Chris, you got such great.

Sources.

I,

I, I really looked out, not, like I said, when I started I was gonna

write on the whole regiment and then I found all that stuff and I was like,

no, I can do this on one company.

Yeah.

I've got two guys who have journals, one of 'em writing all kinds of sketches.

I've got like 10, 10 or 12 guys who wrote letters that we have copies of.

Uh, and, and even guys in other companies who wrote letters that I

was occasionally able to lean into.

Two weeks before I sent the book off for publishing, I found a letter from a

guy in another company that completely changed a whole chapter of the book.

Oh, wow.

Um, because he was writing about, because I knew that their Lieutenant Colonel Major

had both resigned around the same time.

And I thought it was weird that the lieutenant Colonel, as soon

as he finally got command of the company just up and resigned.

Yeah.

And the records don't say anything about why he resigned.

And then I found this letter from a guy in another company.

Who described how this lieutenant colonel was perpetually drunk and that even one

time they showed out that you like a dress parade in front of everybody, and

he couldn't even lift his sword straight because he was so drunk on the field.

Oh my gosh.

He was quietly encouraged to resign before he led the men in combat and that, that I

had no idea about the alcoholic connection with that particular lieutenant colonel.

And I found that letter two weeks before I published the, uh, the book.

So who knows what I'll find that I wish was in there.

Yeah.

Well, and, and it's one of those things you kind of always, you

know, you're, you're never complete.

You're just kind of done.

Right.

You kind of, eventually you just have to send it off.

And that's so amazing because one of the things that I always like to ask

folks when we talk to book authors is, is there anything that you kind

of started off believing that as you did your research that you were then?

Oh, I was like, oh, I was proven wrong and.

For good, for better or for worse.

Right.

You started off with, I think this is what happened, and then as you did

your research again kind of akin to, to what you were just talking about.

You were, you were proven, you were proven wrong.

I was like, I just, I didn't know that.

Was there anything else like that as you went through this book?

There was one thing that really shocked me, and this is really kind of a macro

view of the Civil War, that when I took that micro view of a single company that

I understood a lot better, which was that.

You know, just how much, when you look at the muster rolls for a regimen

and you see, for example, okay, they've got 70 guys in the company.

That doesn't mean that there were 70 of 'em fighting when they went

into battle at any given time.

Out of those 70 guys in the company, maybe half of 'em were available for

action in battle because there were guys that were on duty as crooks and wagoners.

Detached on guard duty for a while, or, you know, things like that.

When, when company H went into the expert campaign, their

captain wasn't even with them.

They went into one of their deadliest battles, the Battle of

Raymond, without their captain.

'cause their captain was left back at Milliken's Bend in Louisiana,

guarding the supplies for the division.

He was in command of the guards program.

And when you look at the roster of the company, it shows that he was on there.

And so I just assumed he was at the Battle of Raymond, for example.

But then I Oh wow.

Dig into his military roles at the National Archives and I find out, no,

he was on detached service and you know, so I tried to reflect that as

much as I could and get an accurate feel for where these guys were.

So, the one guy who was the company Wagoner, I do a whole section, uh, in

one of the chapters just talking about.

What his job would've been as a wagoner, what that would've entailed.

And, and specifically, there's this battle, it's part of IOA

in northern Mississippi there.

Mm-hmm.

Yep.

Um.

When the Confederates briefly take I uca, and then they're marching away,

the union tried to inter step the Confederate army and cut them off and

try to surround them and destroyed them.

And so they moved these guys rapidly into position and they're fighting this

battle and they're running outta ammo.

And so they send a message back that they need ammunition to keep this battle going.

And so the 20th Ohio is the unit that is deployed to deliver the ammunition

front, and they're 28 miles away.

Oh my

gosh.

And they cover 28 miles in six hours with the ammunition for an entire army.

And so I, I look a marathon at that story.

Through the lens of Colgate Busty, who was the company Wagoner?

'cause he would've been the guy driving the wagon that's bringing all this

ammunition and how difficult that was because they were covering 28 miles

in six hours, when normally you would cover about half that distance and

six hours with a loaded way because of all the things that can go wrong.

Just talked about him taking care of the animals and all the things and the

ways in which his life would've been different than average guy on the line.

So I tried to give a very complete picture.

Of what a Civil War company goes through, just the private fighting on the.

That's amazing.

I mean, that's almost like a marathon because

it's Yeah, it's totally a marathon.

I mean, obviously they'd do it in two hours, but Yeah,

yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, I can't run it.

I ran my marathon in like five, so they're like, which is great.

I mean,

that's cool.

Am music.

Yeah.

I was like, wow.

An hour more.

And they went, uh, two more miles than me and they had ammunition.

Wow.

Jen, you're really outta shape and

wearing wool uniforms.

Yeah.

In the south.

Exactly.

Wool carrying all their stuff.

Oh my gosh.

Well, I hear you say you went to the National Archives.

I hear you say, you know, you're, you're writing families and you're

getting newspaper, uh, you know, newspaper copies and letter copies.

How long did all of this research take and where's the farthest place

you went to, to gather information?

So I spent three years doing the research.

Um, wow.

I, I am a researcher by nature.

I, you know, I've been doing genealogy research professionally

for almost 30 years.

So I, I leaned very heavily on online resources for a long time.

There's a lot of stuff that's digital.

One of the things that's frustratingly not digitized for Ohio, that is for most

of the country are the military records.

Um, so you have what are called the compiled military service records,

the C CSRs, which are these, um, try to show you a picture they look like,

um, but they're like the muster rolls.

They're the enlistment forms there.

Any, like if a guy had a leave pass copy of the leave path in his

military record, that kind of stuff.

I was holding in my hands.

For example, a leave pass that had been passed up to chain of command.

And so it was signed by General mc first and General Legget in

General Force, you know, the company commander and the regimental

commander all on one piece of paper.

Um.

Almost all of those military records are digitized and on a website

called fold three.com, except for Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania.

Oh geez.

Sent the most, uh, to the Union Army.

So you have to go to national to get 'em.

Um, and in this case you're talking about.

They'll bring out the Hulk part with the entire 20th Ohio.

And so I've got military service files for 1500 guys.

Wow.

And then I gotta dig through for the 130 that were in company

h uh, throughout the war.

And then each one of those is gonna have 25 or 30 pages in

it with all of the records.

And so, um, here we go.

So here's the cart that had,

oh my gosh.

All of the, uh, my gosh, that's the entire 20th Ohio.

And so for, for our listeners who are listening to this podcast, so he just

showed us basically what you would see, like a library cart, like, like a library

cart with just big boxes of files.

And then this is, so this is the envelope that has Dan Hughes military

and, and inside of that are like 25 cards with all the information.

And it tells me if he was.

And the hospital's sick at some point.

It tells me when his promotion was, tells me how tall he was and what

he did for a living before the war, and what eye color and hair color

and all these physical descriptions.

And I, I work a lot of that into the book too.

You know, when a guy's six feet tall and he's one of the

tallest guys on the regiment, I try to describe that, you know.

Yeah, when a guy is a blacksmith by trade and he gets detached to work

at company headquarters, I know he is probably working on the horses and

things like that, you know, so just those little details that you can only

find by going to the national archives and sitting in a room for eight or

10 hours just flipping through pages.

Yeah, so let, talk to me about that.

So you, first of all, you have to send a request in, right?

So they know what you're coming in for.

So you can request those.

To be sent to you, but it's like $80 for a single one and it takes several months.

Yes,

yes.

Uh, so I can go to Washington, you know, four and a half hour drive, and I

can walk in and I can fill out a form.

So for those records, it's one form.

I fill it out and they bring me the cart.

With the entire 20th Ohio, you can request an entire regimen at once.

Okay.

For the pension files, which can often be a hundred pages or more.

And I got into some of those.

Um, those, you have to fill out individual forms and you can

only get about 20 of them a day.

Um, and, and you could spend all day going through 'em.

I mean, I, I, you know, in single day I got through half of company H'S military

files and to go through all their pensions would take me probably a week.

Oh my God.

But there's so much there, you know, there's little details.

Amos Wright, who was a private, is describing.

The night, uh, they spent between the two days of the Battle of Shiloh on

the side of a hill, uh, in sight of the enemy, so we couldn't have fires.

And he's talking about how there was sleet falling down.

And he says, alls I have was this rubber blanket to lay on

the ground and try to sleep.

And none of us got any.

And that was in his pension file.

And he was talking about how stick he got from his service and he

talked about this 18-year-old named Theodore Nurnberger was a German kid.

From northeast Ohio, who from on the march to Shiloh, got rheumatism.

And he said his feet gave out and he could never walk after that

and he ended up being discharged.

Uh, so those little details are in pension files?

Yes.

So you have to re So basically you have to research all of that.

Yeah.

You have to take all that time.

That means you gotta stay there.

For all those hours, get a hotel.

Like, it's a lot.

It's a, I I know when you research it's a lot.

It's a, it's an experience.

It's almost like you rode your, yeah.

And, and you asked about distance wise.

I mean, I, I tried to go to as many of the battlefields where they fought as I could

because as you know, you understanding the place changes when you visit that place.

Yes.

Uh, great example for listeners that I always use with people

is, um, if you go to Deley Plaza where President Kennedy was shot.

I dunno if you've ever been,

we haven't done it yet.

Yeah,

we still

need to go

in

Dallas.

We haven't done, well completely change your perspective on that event.

When you go there, it's so small and the distance between like the school book

depository window and where Kennedy was hit is so much closer than I realized.

It was the distance from where Zapruder was standing when he filmed

and where Kennedy was standing.

Was so close.

It was like 50 feet.

It was so close.

Yeah.

Oh my gosh.

You know, seeing the videos and watching it, you don't get that perspective.

And then standing there, you understand it going to Shiloh.

Mm-hmm.

And seeing how broken the terrain is and seeing how uphill the

confederates were attacking helps you understand that battle a lot better.

Yeah.

You know, just, I had to try and see those places as many as I could anyway.

So what's the furthest one you went to?

The furthest place I went that the 20th went was South Carolina,

Charleston, South Carolina.

And that was, that's another area that people don't talk about.

'cause there weren't really any big battle fought during what they call

the Carolinas campaign until they got into North Carolina and fought at

Bentonville near the end of the war.

But some of the most difficult days for the 20th Ohio was marching through the

swamps of South Carolina in January.

Oh wow.

Where there are waste.

Sometimes chest deep in water, holding their guns for hours,

walking through these swamps and having to camp in those areas.

And there's a description other place when, when they're in Louisiana, across

the river from Vicksburg, where they're describing how they couldn't even eat

their food because the bugs were so bad.

That you opened your mouth and you flew in.

Oh

my gosh.

So they would do these things where they would surround a campfire.

They would sit around the campfire, and then they would surround behind them

with cotton bales and they would light 'em on fire and try to use the smoke.

The smoke, yeah.

To protect them so they could open their mouths long enough to eat.

Just little things like that.

That's, that's wild.

And, and one of the things that I thought was kind of neat that you talk about

going to the location, kind of really understanding it that much more is when

you and Jen went out to Shiloh, the park service was doing some controlled

burns, and so there was, it was smokey, like it was smokey everywhere.

And so I'm watching the footage.

I didn't, I didn't have the opportunity to go.

But I was watching the footage and Jen, I remember Jen coming home and

she said, you know, it was smokey.

They were doing all these controlled burns, and both of you

guys commented like, we were both

excited.

I was like, that you guys were both excited because this is must have

been what it looked like, right?

Yeah.

When they're firing these cannons and the smoke off in the air and all this stuff.

And even just from me watching back some of the footage of, of you guys, you

know, chatting and, and walking around some of the cemeteries, um, was, was

really neat to, to see some of that.

Yeah.

It, uh, another one of those things you don't think about is that this is the

era of before they had smokeless powder.

Mm-hmm.

And so couple thousand guys firing off a couple ies and pretty

soon you can't see anything.

Yep.

And you can understand how quickly command and control can break down.

You can understand how friendly fire incidents can become much common.

You know, there's even description by some of the 20th Ohio guys

after a long march, their uniforms looked gray just from all the dust.

Sure.

And then if you go into battle like that.

You know, so stuff you don't think about.

Yeah.

Now one of the other things, so you guys, you on, on the video that where

Jen and, and you were, were talking together, you went to where the 20th Ohio

was, but you also went off to another area where you had, I believe another.

Ancestor there.

Was it, uh, the only part of the name that I can remember was

Rob Robert Duval was last name.

Oh

yeah.

Yeah.

So Andrew Jackson Duval.

Yeah.

Andrew Jackson Duval.

So can you tell us about him?

So, Andrew Jackson Duval is from, uh, area right around Steubenville, Ohio.

So it's about an hour south of me, but he was the, he was a brother

to my third great grandfather and

Okay.

Um, he come from a military family.

His father, Maureen Duval, uh, was.

A colonel in the war of 1812, and he is a relative of Robert Duval.

They, they have common ancestry.

That's so cool.

Um, but Andrew Jackson Duval is a really tough looking dude who, um, I'll try

to pull up the picture for you, at least for the people that we want here.

Uh, who was in the 77 Ohio and was killed, uh, on April 8th, 1862.

So this would've been what they call the.

The Battle of Fallen Timbers, which was this little skirmish with Nathan

Bedford Forest right after, yeah.

The Battle of Shiloh, the 77th Ohio was involved in.

And here's him.

He's a, I just think he's kind of a tough looking dude.

Yeah.

He, he looks like he could, uh, he could do some damage.

Yeah.

He was a sergeant and I did his pension file years ago, and when I

got into his pension file and I opened up, there was a letter he wrote to

his parents in the pension file.

And I thought, why on earth their son was killed early in the war?

Why would they give up this letter?

And the reason why is because a lot of these guys were sending their money home

to their families, to their parents,

to support

them.

And in order to get a, for your child who was killed, you had to prove that

they were financially supporting you.

Gotcha.

And so they sent this letter into the government because he wrote in there, here

I'm put the money to help you guys out.

And so they had to prove that.

So there was this letter written a week before he was killed.

Wow.

That I'm holding in my hand.

And it was like, it was brand new because it had been in this folder for 160 years.

It was amazing.

God, that's

amazing.

That's that's so, that's so cool.

I mean, that's amazing.

Like, that's just amazing.

The sources are there, right?

They're there for you.

You just have to go find, find him.

That's so much out

there.

Yeah.

Like I always say like, people, you know, we're history content creators and, and

people are always more content creators are coming and they always ask me, well.

I feel like it's saturated.

I'm like, yeah, but there's still a lot of history that needs to be seen and done.

There's so much.

So you're fine.

Don't worry.

Right, right.

So, um,

and I think that's one of the things, and you, you guys know this too, is

you try to find the angle that hasn't

mm-hmm.

Been given or you know, the lens through which to view.

Because even at the big events that everybody talks about, there are still

unique ways to tell those stories.

Oh yeah.

You know, so I'm telling the story of Vicksburg, which lots of people

have written books about Vicksburg, but I'm looking at Vicksburg

through the lens of one company.

And their experience was different than other companies.

Uh, you know, they were on the, they were right in the center of the line,

and I was all excited to tell the story of them witnessing the surrender,

because the surrender happened right in front of their position.

If you go to the spot where the 20th Ohio was positioned at Vicksburg.

You can see the, the marker for the surrender site.

Yeah.

But they weren't there anymore researching the book.

I found out that two weeks before the surrender, there was a rumor that

Joe Johnston was back in Jackson, Mississippi gathering an army.

Mm-hmm.

And so they put together this group called the Army of Observation to

go keep an eye on Johnston so they didn't attack them from the rear.

And the 20th Ohio was, was the only regimen in there.

Division that was pulled out of the line to go be a part

of this army of observation.

Oh gosh.

So they didn't even get to see the surrender.

Oh.

Oh man.

So, you know, before I wrote the book, I didn't know that.

I just went there.

I saw the marker for where they were stationed and assumed they saw

the whole thing and they didn't.

Yeah.

And everybody's experience was different.

That's so cool though.

So, so tell me, what's the title of the book?

How can we Get It?

I wanna know all about this.

I, I can't wait

to hear it.

Yeah, so it's, uh, Trumbull County Boys and I'll, I'll show a picture here.

This is my, um.

My art, my like author's copy.

And so like yeah.

You know, there's a line in the middle of it says Be not, which won't be there in

your copy

can buy

it.

Yeah.

In this, this picture for those who are watching, uh, the video, um, is actually

a picture of four sergeants from the company in Company A. It was taken in

Memphis, ah, in uh, January of 1863.

Uh, and uh, this guy here, uh, this is William Downs, who was the first

sergeant, ended up in Andersonville.

Nine months.

Oh my gosh.

The war was captured in Atlanta.

Um, and then this guy up here, uh, this is Zer Kraken book who has an amazing

name, and he was actually Mortally wounded at the Battle of Atlanta.

Um, so yeah, him and his, his nephew both were, um, sergeants in the company.

They were the same age, but I called, called Trump County Boys because, um.

The re the company was raised in Trumbull County, which is,

I grew up in Trumbull County.

Um, and Edward Downs, the company commander who wrote a lot of

these letters home, often refer to them as the Trumble County Boys.

It was what he called them.

And so I just thought it was the perfect name for, uh, for it, even though they

didn't all county, most of them did.

That's how they got referred to in letters.

Um, it trumbull county boys.com is the website.

You can actually get an autographed copy of the book,

hardcover copy of the book there.

Now, um, it also has a sample chapter of the book you can read.

It has a breakdown of every chapter of what you'll be reading

about in each chapter, so you can see what the whole story is.

Uh, and then I've got photos as many of the guys as I found

photos for from the company.

So you can kind of learn, you know, get this their faces and learn

who these guys were a little bit.

Um, it's also gonna be available on Amazon.

Uh, the release date is April 6th.

So by the time people watch this, there is a chance that

it's available on Amazon already.

Um, uh, both hardcover and uh, paperback.

But if you wanna get that signed copy, you can do that now on trumble account

voice.com or just watch for on Amazon.

Very cool.

And of course, vlogging through history.

You can still see you on YouTube and, uh, we will have a

collaboration video coming out soon.

Yes.

So people will learn about me.

No, I'm joking.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I obviously.

I want as many people as possible to, to follow you guys.

And one of the things I just love, uh, Jen in particular for you, is

that I, I say this all the time.

We need more women doing history.

Thank

you.

Uh, we don't have nearly enough women.

You know, my channel, I look at the demographics, my channel's

92% male, the audience.

Uh, so we need women telling these stories from a woman's perspective.

And of course, you guys both have the military perspective as well.

Yeah.

Which gives you a unique lens through which.

To view all of this and, uh, I just, I think it's needed and, and I love what you

guys do and I love watching your channel and I love that we're gonna get to hang

out, uh, all of us, uh, the three of us plus some other friends in Gettysburg.

Yeah, I'm super excited.

Thank you, Chris.

I mean, that's one of the things I love about being a history content creator.

We've all helped each other.

Because I think historians like the, again, the authenticity of your book,

the authenticity of real people's lives being there, what they went through, what

they ate, what they saw, what they drew.

We understand even telling these stories, the authenticity of it.

And so I think we see like kindred spirits in each other.

And so, um.

Yeah, working together is always a treat, and I was very excited to be

able to meet you and to tell this story, and I'm looking forward to the book

and then seeing you next weekend too.

Yeah.

Well, for our listeners and our watchers, um, again, thanks

for, for hanging with us.

If you guys wanna find the book, remember it's called Trumble County

boys@trumblecountyboys.com, where you can look it up on Amazon.

I encourage you guys to go check it out because again, as the

non-story nerd, uh, in this part, in the part of this conversation.

One of the things I enjoy is learning about those stories and those amazing

stories and uncovering this stranger than fiction real life stories,

these just amazing things that, that, uh, the researchers and the

historians in the room, which is not me, but that you guys uncover.

And so I sounds to me like there's gonna be plenty of those in this book.

So that's Trumble County Boys.

Head over to trumbull county boys.com and uh, I'll include

links in our show notes and we'll, we'll talk to you guys next time.

Thank you.

Thank

you.

Awesome.

Thank you.

This has been a Walk with History, production Talk with History is

created, hosted by me, Scott Benny, episode Researched by Jennifer Benny.

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