I believe there may be a Civil War veteran that has escaped public notice on the wishes of the family. I looked on several web sites about this individual's personal history before the public became aware of this individual minus any reference to the Civil War. This looks like complete omission from one of the most well known authors of the American Midwest. Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Pa", Charles Ingalls, has no public record of his involvement or non-involvement during the American Civil War.
He was born January 10, 1836 in Minnesota. He married Caroline Quiner on February 1, 1860. I checked Wiki and other sites to confirm those dates. Now, the interesting thing is that the first daughter, Mary, wasn't born until January 10, 1865. Laura was born in 1867.
Usually, in those days, the babies tended to arrive very quickly after marriage. Most exceptions are where there is distance seperation from sea voyages, wagon trails, and the occasional war.
Public records do say that Charles Ingalls was born from the De lano family lineage stemming from the Mayflower. This could be a very small possibility that the family had the pull to keep him out of the war.
According to the story from his daughter wrote about his earlier life, Pa had the "wanderlust". The question is this. Why would a young man of 25 years with a young bride travel from place to place in the midwest while a civil war was raging back east allowing the Indians of the midwest have more freedom to roam and cause hostilities due to lack of major Federal troops and Calvary in the region?
This is very thin data to go on but does raise interesting questions about his undocumented part of his life prior to the series of Little House books.
Minnesota did provide men for the Union with 20 brigades. I looked for Ingalls in the records and found 15 Ingalls. No actual Charles Phillip Ingalls but records could've been inaccurate. Possibly, he might have changed his name slightly during the war. A couple of his brothers and cousins did serve in the Minnesota brigades.
It's totally possible that he was never involved in the war also.
When he lived in Walnut Grove, he was the butcher and the Justice of the Peace not a worker in the saw mill as depicted in the TV series. That's two careers that tend to get messy at times and takes a hard man to do.
Seems to me that he was a man who didn't talk about his experiences in the war and lived the American dream until dying in South Dakota in 1902 at 66 years of age.
