For the most part, writers described the terrible suffering of a mother who sent four sons off to war, with only one returning. There’s no question they suffered tragic losses during the Civil War, but parts of their story may well have been juiced up by reporters hoping to inspire deep empathy or poignancy. The truth sometimes emerges to replace embellishments that appeared in the long-accepted, oft-repeated version of a story. In many cases, we may never be sure exactly what happened, but the availability of digitized records (a subject addressed here last week in story comments) has changed the game.
In covering such tragic tales, the principal difficulty lies in getting it right―no small task when the main event occurred 150 years ago. Among the interesting stories to review during this sesquicentennial of the Civil War are those of North Country families who paid an unusually high price.
