This past August Army Private Sandy Wills was buried with full military honors at a veterans’ cemetery in Memphis, Tennessee. Private Wills served his country, though not in this century, or the last. He died in 1889.
He was originally laid to rest in an unmarked grave, a Civil War veteran all but lost to history.
“No one knew about Sandy Wills,” said Cheryl wills, Sandy’s great-great-great-granddaughter. “An enslaved man leaves a plantation, serves during the Civil War with Lincoln’s army, and poof! Like it never happened.”
Cheryl didn’t know of him, or her family’s long military legacy, until she started researching her ancestry. And it was tragedy that first sparked her interest in genealogy.
Her father, a New York City firefighter and Vietnam-era veteran, was killed in a motorcycle accident when she was a teenager. She recalled, “When I sat at his funeral, the one thing that was burned into my heart was when the military honored him. And then they handed my mother a folded flag. And at that moment, I realized my father was special in the eyes of the greatest army in the world.”