![]() These are meaningful connections to me, linking my work back to the very real people who lived those poignant stories that I love to share so much. I’ve had a descendant of Stonewall Jackson hear me tell the tale of his last days, and now I’ve had a descendant of Grant hear me tell the tale of his last days. I often meet the descendants of soldiers who fought in the war, but not often do I meet the descendants of specific people I’ve written about. John, beneath the wide brim of his tall sun hat and nearly buried under his own beard, had those same sorts of eyes: alive, expressive, intense. ![]() ” she recalled, saying they “reflected sentiments and responded instantly with sympathetic light to what was going on round him.” “Only the eyes glowed or grew deep with humor and intensity. Talking with John, I’m struck by something his great-aunt wrote about their famous ancestor. “So, I don’t remember any thing about it, except that I think that my mother, two sisters, and I had our photo taken on the front steps.” “I have only been to Grant’s Cottage once and it was back in the early 1950s,” he told me. Griffiths, as a child, visited the cottage shortly thereafter. In 1949, Ulysses III returned to Grant Cottage as an adult to revisit the scene of his grandfather’s last days. Young Julia’s brother, Ulysses III-John Griffiths’ grandfather-was three at the time the photo was taken. “He always gave her a smile then, and the cloud of trouble for the moment was raised.” “My grandfather always wore a slight frown in those days, which grandmama would smooth out in passing with her tiny, beautiful hand,” Julia wrote of those last months. As Princess Cantacuzène, she wrote a detailed account of her grandfather’s last days as part of her memoir, My Life Here and There. The other child was Griffiths’s great-aunt, Julia Dent Grant, who later went on to marry into Russian nobility. “One of them, a little boy dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy, I knew very well. “There are two children seated in the front of that photo,” Griffiths told me. Griffiths recalled a photo of the family seated on the front porch of Grant Cottage in upstate New York, taken during Grant’s last days. Grant III –> Julia Grant Griffiths –> John Griffiths Grant III, the eldest son of Frederick Dent Grant, Ulysses S. Julia (named after her maternal great-grandmother) was the daughter of Ulysses S. John and his two sisters are the children of Julia Grant Griffiths. Grant’s descendants: great-great grandson John Griffiths. ![]() Last month, while giving a talk for the Friends of Wilderness Battlefield on Grant’s Last Battle, I had the chance to meet one of Ulysses S. Me and Grant’s descendant, John Griffiths Without Concealment, Without Compromise.Matchless Organization: Nonsurgeon Employees of the Surgeon General’s Office.Matchless Organization: Medical Officers in the Regular Confederate Army.The Bonds of War: Imprisoned Members of the 96th Illinois. ![]() The Bonds of War: Mother of the Regiment.The Bonds of War: New Flag for 96th Illinois.The Bonds of War: Edward and Nancy Murray home.The Bonds of War: Edward Murray’s Pension Application.The Delicious If: MacKinlay Kantor’s If the South Had Won the Civil War and Alternative History.God and Generals: A Conversation with Jeff Shaara.Turning Points of the American Civil War.The Summer of ’63: Vicksburg and Tullahoma.
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