Benjamin Ockert

Age 30, he enlisted in New York City for three years and mustered as a Private in Company A, 103rd New York Infantry on 7 December 1861.

He was wounded in action at Antietam on 17 September 1862:

A musket ball entered the skin just below the point of the acromion on the left shoulder, and came out in the hollow corresponding to the outer concavity of the clavicle, shooting over a couple of inches of skin, entering again near the middle of the clavicle, fracturing the bone at its most prominent point, and, passing on, grazed the skin of the next, doing no further damage, The shoulder joint does not appear to have been opened, and the compound fracture of the clavicle seems to be the most serious part of the injury. The lungs are not implicated.

He was treated at the Locust Spring field hospital on the Geeting Farm near Keedysville to about the end of the year, then at the Smoketown Hospital near the battlefield. He was admitted to US Army General Hospital #1 in Frederick, MD on 27 April 1863, by which time he was healing well and pieces of bone had been removed, but his shoulder was completely paralyzed. He was sent on to the Jarvis General Hospital in Baltimore on 16 June and discharged there on 20 July 1863.

In June 1870 a pension examiner in Washington, DC reported his left shoulder still immobile and his arm shortened by one and a half inches. He was examined in Little Rock, AR in September 1873 showing no improvement.

His service from the NY Adjutant General,1 as Benjamin Ookarl, his Muster Roll Abstract, and his pension card, the latter two online from fold3. He's also seen as Benjamin Ookards, Ockart, and Ockert. His pension records have the alias Paul Ertill for him. Wound and hospital details from the MSHWR,2 quoted above.

c. 1831

05/10/1889; St Louis, MO