Conrad Joachim, a German immigrant, marched off to war from his home on Greenwich Street in Manhattan on May 13, 1862, enlisting as an assistant surgeon in the 15th New York Heavy Artillery. Charles Joachim, whom historians believe to be his son, had already joined the same unit.<\/p>\n
Four months later, Conrad was dead; and in another year, so was Charles, at about the age of 20. They were buried in the same grave at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, beneath a marble headstone that is an exquisitely carved open book inscribed with both their names. But the stone slowly sank into the earth as the centuries turned twice, and the cemetery and the city were completed around them.<\/p>\n
The Joachim family\u2019s sacrifice may have been forever lost to history if not for a formidable labor of detective work involving hundreds of volunteers and lasting longer than the Civil War itself. Now the Joachims are among more than 1,200 Civil War soldiers with new gravestones at Green-Wood. And today, for the first time, the cemetery is honoring the full known complement of veterans of the country\u2019s deadliest war.<\/p>\n
Dozens of veterans\u2019 descendants, some from as far away as Spain, will be joined at 9 a.m. by volunteers and Civil War re-enactors for a public ceremony. There will be a parade, a color guard, a fife and drum corps, crashing salutes from an artillery battery and speeches of welcome and remembrance. Then, descendants and history lovers will read the names of the veterans.<\/p>\n
Over five years, the volunteers have scoured not only Green-Wood\u2019s grounds, but also cemetery records, pension and enlistment archives, government databases, regimental histories, published obituaries and death notices. They have also found and interviewed soldiers\u2019 descendants.<\/p>\n
The project identified not 200 Civil War veterans \u201d\u201d as had originally been expected \u201d\u201d but 2,998. Many gravestones were missing, damaged or obliterated; some, like the Joachims\u2019 marble, had sunk beneath the grass. And so the volunteers filled out more than 1,200 applications for new markers, since the Department of Veterans Affairs supplies them if originals are unreadable or lost.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a work of historical rescue,\u201d\u009d said one of the volunteers, Jeffrey Blustein, a medical ethicist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. \u201cHistory isn\u2019t just about the rich and famous, it\u2019s about all the forgotten people, ordinary people who otherwise would never be known.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n