behind AotW

Antietam on the Web achieved a milestone today – we now can show you faces of 2,000 of the participants in the Battle of Antietam as they probably looked when they were there.

This is not far from 10% of the nearly 22,000 people in the AotW database and is amazing to me – I’ve been putting up pictures of them one at a time as I find them, for many years, not really keeping score.

A big thank you to all the descendants and collectors who have shared their treasured pictures with me, and to all the organizations large and small who have posted theirs online for me to find.

To mark the day, here’s one of my most recent finds and poignant faces – that of 17 year old William E Hacker of Worcester, Massachusetts. A recent graduate of a military prep school in Worcester, he was appointed 2nd Lieutenant of Company A, 3rd Maryland Infantry in March 1862, and fought with them at Antietam, where he was shot in the chest. He survived that and returned to duty in January 1863, soon after promoted to Captain, but died of typhoid fever in March 1863 at age 18.

His carte de visite (CDV) here is one of two of him in the Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs at the Library of Congress – a massive and growing resource for people like us.

If you have a wartime picture of someone who was at the battle, or know of one online I haven’t seen yet, please let me know. I have so much more to do.