Bring up the Civil War, and sooner or later in that conversation, I’ll be time-traveling back to my adolescence, between the ages of 10 and 12, turning the pages for the umpteenth time of my family’s two-volume set of the “American Heritage Civil War.” I’d be charging through the fields and woods around our home with friends, pretending to be a Billy Yank or a Johnny Reb, or setting up several hundred blue and gray plastic toy soldiers with my brother in our basement playroom.

Nearly every summer, Mom and Dad would pack us kids into a station wagon and drive from our home in Piedmont, North Carolina, to New Castle, Pennsylvania, to visit grandparents and other relatives. Route 11 ran straight up the Shenandoah Valley—there was no interstate route then—and here was more magic as we traveled through battlefields and historic towns. Lexington, Staunton, New Market, Strasburg were all imbued with Civil War history. I’d look at the old houses and wonder whether Confederate troops had once marched past those front porches, or we’d stop at some country store selling Civil War memorabilia and even authentic bayonets and Minie balls (cylindrical bullets used in rifles during the Civil War). For a kid like me, this trip through history was the equivalent of a gargantuan hot fudge sundae crowned with heaps of whipped cream.

And best of all, topping off that sundae was the cherry: my visits with my great-uncle John.

Every year, Uncle John and some of his family would arrive at my paternal grandparents’ house from nearby Ohio and spend a day with our family. He and the other adults would sit in the living room chattering away, playing cards, drinking a beer or two, and grossing out the kids by eating Limburger cheese and onions on rye. But as the day thickened into that lovely green Pennsylvania twilight, Uncle John and I would take an electric lantern and head to the backyard picnic table, where for an enchanted hour or so, he’d share our family’s history, telling me stories about the Civil War and the veterans he’d personally known, and reading from letters he owned that were written during the war by our ancestors.

Diaries written by a young woman who lived during the Civil War, 1863. (Historical Society of Pennsylvania (CC BY 4.0, CreativeCommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0))

How these annual seminars started I have no idea, though I suspect my dad told him of my love for the past. But I well remember how Uncle John looked as he sat opposite me, a man in his 60s who appeared ancient to my adolescent self. He was bespectacled, hair clipped short around his large ears, and had a sparkling enthusiasm in his eyes and voice.

From him, I learned so much. For example, our Minick ancestors and kinfolk with names like Bland and McNichol were staunch abolitionists involved in the local Underground Railroad. Two Bland brothers married Minick girls before trooping off with the Union Army to fight Lee in Virginia. One of them was severely wounded at Fredericksburg.

Uncle John also shared his memories of events that he himself had witnessed, such as when a Pennsylvania National Guard unit marched off to a train bound for the Mexican border where they would join efforts to battle Pancho Villa, or an ugly incident during World War I, when the Ku Klux Klan burned a barn owned by a German-American.

And those letters—I still remember him chuckling as he commented on how every piece of that correspondence commenced with, “I am sitting myself down to write you this letter.” I was astounded by one letter in which a young woman, who had gone to Washington to care for her wounded brother, reported that she’d seen Abraham Lincoln walking along the street that day.

Over the next three decades, Uncle John and I lost track of each other. When Dad told me he had died, memories of our picnic table classroom returned to me, and I regretted not keeping in touch.

Uncle John remembered those evenings, too. Shortly after his death, a package arrived in the mail. He had asked his sons to send me the Civil War letters. His thoughtfulness and generosity stunned me, and I was determined to use his gift for the good of others, as he had for me. Several years later, when the homeschoolers in my American history class studied the Civil War, I divided the class into teams and had each team transcribe one of the letters, which by then were almost 150 years old. If nothing else, those antiques allowed them to “feel” history through their fingertips.

More important than the letters, though, was how Uncle John helped fuel the fire burning inside of me with his respect, zeal, and love for the past. He was that rare sort who recognized that all people of a certain age are history books with a heartbeat, runners capable of passing a torch from one generation to the next. He’d known men like my distant uncle Marion McNichol, for instance, who had served in the Union Army, and they in turn had known elderly people who were youngsters during the time of the American Revolution.

Uncle John’s understanding of the past as a living thing was his greatest gift to me. This was the true legacy he bestowed onto that kid some 60 years ago, a picnic table inheritance for which I have been forever grateful.

This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.