Monday, February 25, 2008

Albert Dewitt Carr

Albert Dewitt Carr was born March 14, 1838, in Pennsylvania, the son of Stutley (1798-1888) and Elizabeth (Tyler, 1800-1844).

Stutley was born in Herkimer County, New York and married Elizabeth before 1825 when their son William was born. By 1830 Stutley was living in Dryden, Tompkins County, New York, and by 1840 in Cossawago, Crawford County, Pennsylvania. After Elizabeth died in 1844 he married New York native Eunice Eliza Stafford (b. 1812). By 1850 Albert (listed as Dewitt) was attending school with his younger sister Laura and living with his father and stepmother and other younger siblings on a farm in Union City, Erie County, Pennsylvania.

At some point Albert left Pennsylvania and moved west. By 1860 he was a laborer working for and/or living with a farmer by the name of Jessie Mattison in Concord, Jackson County, Michigan. (His brother William and family as well as his sister Adelia apparently resided in Lansing that same year.) He was living in Lansing when he married Jessie Mattison’s daughter, Vermont native Augusta D. Mattison (1842-1911) on November 20, 1860, in Jackson, Jackson County, Michigan. In any case, by the time the war broke out he was a member of the Lansing company called the “Williams’ Rifles”, whose members would serve as the nucleus of Company G.

Albert was 22 years old and probably living with his wife and working in Lansing when he enlisted in Company G on May 10, 1861.

According to Frank Siverd of Company G, Albert was sick with “inflammation of the lungs” at Cantonment Anderson in Grand Rapids shortly before the regiment left Michigan in June of 1861. In fact, when the Third Michigan left Michigan on Thursday, June 13, 1861, for Washington, DC, Albert was one of three dozen or so men too sick to travel and he soon went home to Lansing to recover. He reportedly died of congestion of the lungs at his brother’s house (probably William w.) in Lansing on August 12 or 16, 1861, and was presumably buried there.

In April of 1873 when Mt. Hope cemetery was first opened in Lansing, Albert’s remains were reinterred in the Carr family plot in section B, lot 3, grave 10 of Mt. Hope cemetery.

In 1885 his widow was residing in Sandusky County, Ohio when she applied for and received a pension (no. 240099).

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