Dear Friend Lydia

by John Breithaupt

About 25 years ago, my Uncle Bob — my mother’s oldest brother — gave me several boxes of genealogical material about my mother’s side of the family. My uncle had received this material from his grandfather, who had received it from his uncle. Each custodian of the material seems to have added something to it. The chain of custody appears to have extended back to the 1850s or 1860s, when some family member first got the genealogical itch.

My uncle didn’t tell me what to do with this material, other than keep it until I felt that it was time for me to pass it on to a family member in the next generation. But I decided to go through the material and sort things out. The material was mostly letters, and the letters were mostly about the ordinary things of life: births, deaths, weddings, and recipes.

One day after I had been sorting the material for several hours, I came across two letters that stood out from the rest. Both had been written by a soldier in the Union army, one at the beginning of the civil war, and the other shortly after it ended. Both letters were meant for Lydia Good, the 19 year old unmarried sister of my great great grandmother Martha Ellen Conard. Both letters were signed “William Scribble” — I am using “scribble” as his last name because he didn’t write his last name legibly on either letter.

The contrast between the mood and content of the two letters could not be greater.

The letters raised three questions:

• What was William Scribble’s actual last name? Without an answer to this question, it would be difficult to answer the two other questions:
• What exactly happened to William Scribble between the time when he wrote the first letter to Lydia and the time when he wrote the second? and
• What happened to him after the war?

For twenty years I had no answers to these questions. I had hoped to be to able answer them before I passed the genealogical material onto the next generation, but it looked like I was not going to be able to do this. I grew more frustrated as the years passed. I was making no progress at all. And then one day, in 2018, a friend of ours mentioned that she had just finished a course in the techniques of genalogical research that was offered by the adult education department at Boston University, and that several people who had taken the course had agreed to meet once a month to work on genealogical projects. I told her about the mystery of William Scribble. She said she thought that her genealogist friends would like to take that o