There was at lease one other person with the same name who served. It is my opinion that the person who remembered him as a deserter had the wrong person. The documentation needed to verify their service often consisted of finding anyone alive who might remember them.

One included 5 extra days of pay as this was the time it was calculated it would take for him to walk the 100 miles back to his home! That does not sound like a deserter to me? Often their pension or bounty land claimes were processed many years after their inlistments. In my searches I discovered discahage papers from his units. They were both denied anything afterword for their service? One was claimed to have deserted thit his whatever he was issued. I have two ancestors who served in New York Militia units during the war of 1812. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Buckles lived 110 years, passing away on February 27, 2011.

He endured nearly three years of cruel treatment before being freed after a US Army raid on the prison where he was held. He was in the Philippines in 1941 when Japan invaded and became a civilian POW. Buckles went to work as a purser on commercial ships. Following the war, Buckles sailed home aboard the Carpathia – the same ship that rescued survivors of the Titanic. He mostly drove ambulances and motorcycles in Germany and France. He enlisted at 16 and served in the American Expeditionary Forces with a detachment from Fort Riley. Buckles was born on February 1, 1901, in Missouri. WWI: The last surviving American veteran of WWI was Cpl. On his 109 th birthday, Woolson said he enjoyed pipes and cigars and smoked for nearly a century, beginning when he was 12. During Woolson’s lifetime, he had a front-row seat to history and watched the industrial revolution transform the country’s landscape. He enlisted as a drummer boy on October 10, 1864, in the 1 st Minnesota Heavy Artillery Regiment, Company C. Woolson was born in Antwerp, Minnesota, on February 11, 1847. It’s hard to comprehend that a soldier who met President Lincoln in the 1860s survived long enough to see Elvis Presley’s hits top the charts in the 1950s. Civil War: When Albert Henry Woolson was young, he met Abraham Lincoln.

Last veteran of his wwii battle group