2nd great-uncle of Patricia Galloway

Private       Co. E      21st MI Infantry

Dates of Service:  11 Aug 1862 - died of disease 17 Feb 1863

James W. Newson, son of William A. and Emily M. (Harrison) Newson, was born in New York about 1844. In 1850, he with his parents and younger brother Horace were living in Galen, Wayne Co., New York, where their father found work as a shoemaker. Two sisters, Rachel and Caroline, were born in New York before the family relocated in 1851 to Kent Co., Michigan, where another brother, Shadrach, was born in 1860. James, in 1860, was working as a "horticulturist."  

At the age of 18, James, along with his father William A. (aged 40), and his brother Horace enlisted in Co. E, Twenty-first Infantry on August 11, 1862. They mustered in on September 3, 1862, at Brownville, Michigan, which is located 16 miles from Grand Rapids, Michigan. The town is now known as Alaska. James died of typhoid fever 17 Feb 1863 at Nashville, Tennessee, and is buried in the Nashville National Cemetery in Madison, Davidson Co., Tennessee. He was 19 years old.

 
Information from www.cem.va.gov/cems/nchp/nashville.asp for the Nashville National Cemetery states, "The remains of 36,069 soldiers (as of Aug 2014) from all wars are interred here, including 16,485 known Union Civil War soldiers and 4,141 unknowns. Established in 1867, the original interments were the remains of Union soldiers removed from temporary burial grounds around Nashville’s general hospitals, as well as the Civil War battlefields at Franklin and Gallatin, Tennessee, and Bowling Green and Cave City, Kentucky. The stone wall surrounding the property and the limestone archway at the entrance were completed about 1870. The cemetery was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1996.

NOTE: No Confederate soldiers are buried in Nashville National Cemetery."

SOURCES: Compiled from Federal Census Records,21st Regiment of Michigan Infantry records, findagrave.

GRAVESITE: Nashville National Cemetery, Madison, Davidson Co., Tennessee

Written by Dorotha Piechocki, February 2020