Gettysburg and Uncle Jacob

My great great grandparents lived in Adams County, Pennsylvania, home of Gettysburg.  In early letters to their son David living near Ashton, Illinois, they weren’t too concerned about the war.  Later as things deteriorated, they sent their youngest son, Jacob, to Illinois to live with his older brother David, my grandmother’s father, who really didn’t know him because of the age difference.  But young Jacob got caught up in the war fever anyway, and at age 16 went to Dixon, Illinois, and enlisted.  He died in Tennessee of dysentery a few weeks before the war ended in 1865.  He is buried there in a national cemetery.  It was over 100 years before we even knew of his existence, let alone where he was buried.  One of his sisters in Iowa received a letter from him and his last pay record, which was also his death certificate. When genealogies were being assembled in the 1980s we found out about poor Jacob. His name was listed in the Lee County History compiled 50 years later, but no one in the family thought to read that.