This letter was unsigned by from the content we were able to deduce his wife and daughter to be named Catherine and Viella, and his hometown to be Havana. Using these few clues in Ancestry.com, we were able to identify the soldier as Andrew D. Black (1837-1877), a not so literate native of Rockbridge county, Virginia, who lived in Mason county, Illinois, with his wife and daughter when he volunteered in May 1861 to serve in Co. A. 28th Illinois Infantry.

Andrew datelined his letter from Fort Holt, Kentucky, opposite Cairo, Illinois. The regiment was posted here when he wrote the letter in late November 1861.

Andrew was wounded at the Battle of Shiloh and spent several months in a Memphis hospital before he was discharged for disability on 5 December 1862.

Transcription

Fort Holt, Kentucky
November 29th 1861

Dear Catherine,

I sit down once more to write you a few lines to let you all know that I am still alive yet. It is cloudy this morning. It rained here very hard last night. We have had no snow here yet nor no ice. We are well fixed here for the winter. There is ten men stays in a barracks together and we have a stove in our mess so we do our own cooking now but it goes a little awkward to me for we all get our cooking done for us before.

They have had Bill in the guard house for disobeying orders in Cairo. I was over there yesterday in Cairo but I didn’t get to see him. They only keep him in 5 days. Today he comes out and goes to his company.

It is a sleeting very hard now and rain together.

Catharine, I am afraid that I won’t get to home against Christmas for they are a preparing a fleet to start down the river. Most all of the gunboats is down here from above and the floating batteries from Saint Louis. There was one come down yesterday and there is another one come just now. There is five hundred seamen in Cairo now. They came here from New York to manage the gunboats. There is a great many soldiers here now. I will have to stop writing now for it is dinner time.

Catharine, I take my pen in hand to write you a few more lines. I feel mighty lonesome today here. Glad I would be to be with you and Viella. I didn’t think that when I last parted with you and the babe in Havana that I would been this long from you. But I think the war will come to an end before long. It is the opinion here that the war will end before March.