Some family stories are discovered one record at a time. Others practically leap off the page and demand to be told. That was the case when I stumbled across the story of my distant cousins, twin brothers Charles Leslie Seekell (1849-1925) and James Wesley Seekell (1849-1914).

In 1861 when most twelve-year old boys are still firmly planted in their childhood, these two were swept into the Civil War alongside their father, William H. Seekell (1823-1862) – not as soldiers carrying rifles, but as young musicians carrying the sounds that helped move a war. Their father would not survive the war. The twins would. And the extraordinary story of how two boys, barely old enough to leave home, found themselves in the rank of the Union Army is one that deserves to be remembered.

William H. Seekell was born in 1823 in New York. In 1848 at the age of 25, he marries my 3X great aunt, Mary Ellen ‘Ellen’ Cairns (1828-1892). The following year in 1849, Ellen gives birth to twin boys, Charles and James in Tecumseh, Lenawee County, Michigan. She is 21-years old at the time. According to my research to date, I believe the twins were the only children from this marriage.

The Civil War begins with the shots fired at Ft. Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina on April 15, 1861. A few months later on August 24, 1861, William Seekell and his 12-year old twin sons volunteer for service and are mustered into the 11th Michigan Infantry, Company E as musicians. William is a fifer, the twin boys were drummers.

A little more than a year after they were mustered into the infantry for the State of Michigan, on October 20, 1862 at a Union camp in Nashville, Tennessee, William dies of typhoid fever, leaving his young twin sons fatherless and far from their home in Tecumseh.

What happens next to the twins is extensively detailed in the news article below printed in the Kalamazoo Gazette on March 14, 1914 when Charles and James were older men.

The news article indicates that after being returned from the war to their mother, Ellen, they worked tirelessly on the family farm to pay off the mortgage. That mortgage was paid by the time they were 25 years old.

For some time the twins also owned a grocery store in White Pigeon, Michigan and from another news article I discovered, Charles taught drumming lessons well into his later years.

James Seekell, the first twin to pass, died on November 23, 1914 in St. Joseph, Michigan from a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 65 years old and a ‘retired merchant’.

Charles died in St. Joseph, Michigan on April 12, 1925 from a cerebral hemorrhage (same cause of death as his brother 11 years earlier). Charles was 76 years old. His death certificate indicates at the time of his death he was a ‘grain dealer’.

Charles and James Seekell lived long lives beyond their Civil War experience. Today they are remembered among the youngest veterans of the Civil War, but I think their story is even more extraordinary when we remember what that really means. They were children who experienced things no child should have been asked to endure, witnessed the horrors of battle, lost their father along the way, and somehow made it home to build lives that stretched decades beyond the war. More than 160 years later, I’m proud to pull these two distant cousins of mine out of the ranks once again – not to find them this time, but to simply make sure their remarkable story is not forgotten.