(c. 1839 - 1903)
Home State: Indiana
Branch of Service: Infantry
Unit: 27th Indiana Infantry
Before Antietam
He came to America in the 1850s and was a a 21 year old farmer in Bedford, IN when he mustered as a Private in Company D, 27th Indiana Infantry on 12 September 1861.
On the Campaign
He was wounded in the right knee in action at Antietam on 17 September 1862.
The rest of the War
He reenlisted on 24 January 1864, transferred to Company E, 70th Indiana on 4 November 1864 at Atlanta, and to Company G, 33rd Indiana on 8 June 1865 in Washington, DC. He mustered out of service on 21 July 1865 at Louisville, KY.
After the War
By 1880 he was a railway worker in Perry, Clay County, IN and began receiving a veteran's pension for disability in 1887. In 1900 he was listed as an invalid and lived with his wife Anna and children Edward and Nellie in Terra Haute.
References & notes
Casualty information from Nelson1. His service from Brown, 2 who has him as James Burk, and the Historical Data Systems database. Personal details from family genealogists, his pension card via fold3, and the US Census of 1880 and 1900. His gravesite is on Findagrave. Thanks to great-great-granddaughter Polly Kaczmarek for personal details and for an after-war photograph that her grandmother saved.
He married Anna Callahan (1846-1906) in October 1873 and they had 4 daughters and a son.
Birth
c. 1839 in IRELAND
Death
08/03/1903; Terre Haute, IN; burial in Highland Lawn Cemetery, Terre Haute, IN
1 Nelson, John H., As Grain Falls Before the Reaper: The Federal Hospital Sites and Identified Federal Casualties at Antietam, Hagerstown: John H. Nelson, 2004, pg. 148 [AotW citation 16989]
2 Brown, Edmund Randolph, The Twenty-Seventh Indiana Volunteer Infantry in the War of the Rebellion, Monticello, IN: E.R. Brown, 1899, pg. 586 [AotW citation 18482]