RIP, James Kingsbury, 1835-1863

James Kingsbury made an entrance into my life over the last year. My mother has been transcribing his diary as a fundraiser for the Cook Library Friends Group and often phoned me with details of his agrarian life and accounts of our Tamworth. From the bookjacket:

This young lad writes cautiously at first but, as he warms to the task, he gives us a sharp and concise picture of the life of a teenager of that period. Each member of the family worked hard and long on the farm. They were active in town and church. Family life was close and loving; school was fitted into the farm schedule where practicable; religion was a basic part of their life; and there were also some lighter moments to savor and remember. There was much visiting near and far among family and friends. There were birthday parties, berry picking, mountain climbing, swimming, picnics, sleighing, orating, debating and entertainers coming to town. The Fourth of July was perhaps the highlight of the year and long to be remembered. Read on and see life in the mid 1800s through this teenager’s eyes.

James was a young school teacher with hopes to attend university. The Journal is mostly an accounting of daily life in rural Tamworth, NH. Some mundane, some charming, and somehow he’s become part of the fabric of our family life. Mom shares his latest dispatches over suppers. A favorite from a New Year’s Eve journal entry:

Ere another year shall have passed, we may be numbered with the forgotten and the dead. And our words- with however bright a luster they may shine while we live- be covered with oblivion’s pall. If our deeds are worthy of heaven’s countenance, they will be registered in heaven and will endure when earth’s provided monuments have fell.

According to an letter to his family, James was aboard the the David Tatum, a steamer transporting troops north. But in early August 1863 he vanished at a landing at Helena, Arkansas. No one heard anything again.

Diary of a Tamworth Boy, 1849-1852: Journal of S. James Mills Kingsbury is set to go to print any day and for some reason this morning, I made it my business to find out what happened to young James. Ancestry was first and according to the US Civil War Soldier Records and Profiles, James was “mustered out on 12 Aug 1863 at Helena, AR.” If he had been discharged why hadn’t his friend known it and why hadn’t he come home to NH?

I searched for Union cemeteries in Helena and found nothing. Figuring James for a mere foot soldier lost to history, and as a last effort (and flying in the face of my fancy librarian training) I googled his division, the 9th New Hampshire Infantry, and there, five results down on the page the Internet Archive led me to the History of the Ninth Regiment, New Hampshire Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion (1895). The index showed the Mr. Kingsbury had been misidentified as Kingsley. The rest is, indeed, history:

Another sad incident of the morning was the falling overboard of James Kingsley, of Company K, from the upper deck: so swift was the current that before a boat could be lowered he was lost to sight.

In the space of a Sunday morning, the internet let me trace the lifespan of a neighbor who lived 150 years ago. James Kingsbury, no longer among the forgotten and the dead, welcome home. It’s a good day to be a librarian.