Post edited 3:01 pm – October 10, 2009 by Emmeline

Are the any Civil War related artifacts or archival items at OHS that particularly hold your interest?

My favorite item in the collection is the file of Civil War soldier photographs (call # SC 4613).  Seeing the faces of the men who fought in the war personalizes that bit of history for me. 

The collection also solved a mystery for the Kelton House Museum and Garden where I work part time.   The Kelton House http://www.keltonhouse.com/ is a house museum  focusing on the 3 generations of the Kelton family who lived there from 1852  to 1975, with an emphasis on the  mid-Victorian years when the house was used as a stop on the Underground Railroad.  The eldest son  of the family, Lt. Oscar Dwight Kelton, joined the 95th O.V.I. and was killed at the age of 20 in the Battle of Brice's Crossroads  on June 10, 1864.  The Kelton House has 2 paintings of him that were so different from each other that we weren't sure what he actually looked like.  You can see one of the paintings in the Ohio Memory collection online at http://www.ohiomemory.org/cdm4…..&REC=2
At that time, we did not have any actual photographs of him for comparison.

Then one day, I had one of those serendipitous discoveries that every researcher dreams about.  On a lark, I checked out a copy of OHS's documentary, Ohio in the Civil War, from the library, There, in the final few minutes of the video, popped up a photograph of Oscar!  It was undoubtedly him, as he was posed the same, and his hair jutted out from underneath his forage cap at the same crazy angle as in one of his portraits.  From there I was able to track the original cdv down to the SC 4613 collection where he was listed as a unidentified soldier.

BTW, Ohio Memory also has a collection of letters online that Lt. Kelton had written during the war at http://www.ohiomemory.org/cdm4…..&REC=1 and newspaper clippings and telegrams regarding his death athttp://www.ohiomemory.org/cdm4…..&REC=3