Today was another wild goose chase. I spent the day in a meeting, figuring out who the Lincolns were and trying to remember what I did last week. This entire Burnap collection, which was housed mostly horizontally in one file box, was not in any kind of order beyond various clumps. Most families were stacked together and, like an archaeologist sifting through one layer at a time, I could kind of figure out who went where based on what it was clumped with. Not so the Lincolns.
One of the manuscripts in the best surviving condition is a typewritten packet titled "In Memory of Albert Lincoln: compiled and edited by Marvin Lincoln 1899." This document, about 30 pages in length, stands out for its professionalism. It's typewritten, bound, has footnotes, sources, etc. Its topic is oozing in heavy sentimentality - Western Expansion, early American military, and, a brother's mission to right the wrongs of an indifferent society… The dummy untrained archivist would look at it and think, "This must be important! I need to figure this out!" and so of course I did, too. After about 3 hours, I can't tell you much else.
This document was written/compiled (and presumably printed) by Marvin Lincoln in 1899. The introductory title page spells out his situation clearly - Marvin had a brother Albert, who he was too young to know well. Albert (born 1802) enlisted as a West Point cadet in 1818. In 1822 his unit shipped west, and Albert died at Fort Bellefontaine in St. Louis that same year. Apparently there was an outbreak of some kind and Albert died after a very brief illness before anyone back home knew what had happened. His burial site remained unmarked, though, and Marvin Lincoln's motivation in 1899 was to locate and commemorate his brother's final resting place.
So more than 70 years later, Marvin Lincoln set about contacting US Army officials and military acquaintances of his brothers, in an effort to locate his brother's body and commemorate his short time on earth. All of this is fine, decent, touching and heartbreaking stuff. He reprints letters and newspaper reports from St. Louis as well as full reports by his brother's commanding officers. Despite Marvin’s efforts, though, he was unable to locate his brother's remains or burial site more specifically than the former Fort Bellefontaine site.
Fort Bellefontaine (or Belle Fontaine - Marvin writes it as 1 word but 2015 historians use 2) was established in 1805, the first US Military post west of the Mississippi River. Lewis and Clark began and ended their expedition at Bellefontaine, and it served as an important base for many US government expeditions of the era. But in 1826 the army moved operations to the Jefferson Barracks Military Post and the site of the old Fort eventually became a national park. By the time Marvin Lincoln was asking in the late 1890s, no one knew for sure if Albert was interred somewhere on the old fort grounds or in the new barracks site - all that was clear was that he had been buried but that his name was not listed on any of the marked internment sites of the Jefferson Barracks Cemetery.
This sad fate clearly seemed to weigh on Marvin - he painstakingly tried to recreate his brother's last days. He reprints an urgent letter a concerned acquaintance sent his father after seeing Albert's name on a list of dead or dying published locally in St. Louis papers. His family did not seem to learn about Albert's fate until months later.
The amateur psychologist in me thinks that Marvin Lincoln was so disturbed by his brother's short life and lonely death that he was driven to create this document as a testament to his brother's life. "Look," it seems to scream - "this person mattered." His family (especially their father) clearly had a lot of pride and hope for Albert's future, so to have him cut down more or less immediately at his first post from curable illness must have left deep psychological scars.
So… yet another highly dramatic story, and the added pathos of it sitting unread and unremarked on for 116 years only made it weigh on my mind more and more. I definitely got caught up in the drama of this story. After rummaging through all these indecipherable fragmentary stories I could not hold back from indulging in a readable, concise saga. But the Lincoln Bros. hold two problems for me. Who are they? And why would anyone care now?
The second question is easier to answer - probably no one, maybe military historians? I felt compelled to try to attach a "hook" to the Lincoln papers because they're such a compelling read. Maybe I can "sell" this document to researchers? In addition to his sad death, Marvin covers in intimate detail what life was like for his brother as a West Point cadet in 1818-1822. Seriously - intimate detail. He reprints letters to and from Albert from their father covering student hijinks and scandals, as well as his daily life and class schedule. Marvin includes a wonderfully detailed biographical sketch of every prominent west point instructors and fellow cadets from Connecticut. These sources might be interesting to a person researching specific people or military culture in general. But these are incidental uses - I don't know that anyone, besides me, is going to read this document in the next 116 years specifically to learn about the short life of Albert Lincoln.
The harder question that led me down this rabbit hole in the first place is"Who ARE these people??" I know that I'm supposed to be focusing on the Burnaps. The collection itself is overwhelmingly Hyde papers, though. I know that most of these names - Hyde, Post, Kellogg, Kingsbury, etc. are all cousins in some sense, and all are Hebron/Bolton/Andover big shots. Never once have I seen the name Lincoln. If this packet had been about a Skinner cousin or something I would never have opened it up and spent so long on one thing. I'd have tossed it in the Skinner pile and moved on. Two weeks ago I would have put this in the "I dunno" pile and moved on - but now it's kind of imperative that I put it somewhere. I refuse to do too much more detective work on this. The best I can find is that Marvin Lincoln moved around a lot - his census returns are filed from a different state each decade, including time spent in Washington, DC. He's buried in the Windham, Connecticut Old Cemetery with 3 Posts, 5 Hydes, and 4 Kingsburys. My best guess is that Marvin Lincoln printed many copies of his memorial to his brother and passed them out to influential people he knew either from Windham or from his travels. Because the document looks impressive and because of its weighty subject, our collecting family saved it because it seemed important. It does not have direct bearing on our main story at all.
So was this a day wasted? Did I learn a lesson here? How could I have done this any better or more efficiently? There was no need for me to read the whole document, really. I was skimming through trying to find some reference to any of our main "protagonists" (e.g. "Today I met my new bunk mate - Daniel XYZ Burnap.") But I definitely got a little more into it than was necessary. I also didn't really have to research up Fort Bellefontaine. - Or did I? I had no idea where or what that was. What if this was a firsthand account of some famous plague outbreak? What if, what if, what if???
I am finding that this work is slow-going, with lots of dead ends.