Photo courtesy ACHS

The list of veterans who attended the 1938 reunion at Gettysburg is well-documented … in theory. The official report of the Pennsylvania Commission¹ includes a list of those veterans who attended but there are several problems with that list.

First, the book is hard to find and therefore not readily accessible to most researchers.

Second, the names are sorted by state of residence and then by surname. So if you are searching for a specific soldier, you have to know where he lived in 1938 — which, in many or perhaps even most cases, is NOT the state from which he served in the war. If you don’t know it, you have to search every state for your soldier separately.

Third, the list includes dozens of careless sorting mistakes. So if you aren’t very careful, you may not notice that your SMITH is inexplicably squeezed between ROBINS and ROE.

Similarly, the author’s summary table of “The Number of Veterans, by State, Attending the Reunion” (pg 266) is full of errors with some States under-represented and others over-represented. The actual list contains 1855 names but the total on the summary table is 1845.

It is also worth noting that the “official” list only claims to reflect the names of those veterans whose transportation and housing were paid for by the Commission. There may have been dozens of veterans who attended the reunion at their own expense and are not included in the list. And there is at least one veteran who is known to have attended and received an official badge from the Commission but is not included in the official list.

Here, then, for the benefit of researchers is the complete² and corrected list of attendees, sorted by surname. The army for which each soldier served, (U)nion or (C)onfederate, is identified after his name.

¹Roy, Paul L., editor, “Pennsylvania at Gettysburg: The Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg” (Gettysburg: Times and News Publishing Company, 1939).

²For reasons noted above, any such list is bound to omit some names, including those of veterans who attended at their own expense. As that information becomes available, this list will be updated to include the new information.

³James D. Handock’s official badge (pictured) is in the collection of the Adams County Historical Society.

⁴This may have been Elbert Holmes, a sailor on the USS Restless (among others) of the Federal Navy.  He died on 22 Jul 1939 in Cairo, NC.

⁵The official report lists Theodore S. Pitkin as having served for the “N” army (rather than “U” or “C”), apparently a typo. Compiled service records and pension records indicate that Pitkin was a Private in Co. G, 20th Ohio Inf., from 1 Aug 1863 to 15 July 1865.