A Memorial Day over a century in the making
A Family’s Diary: Reunited in Brooklyn
It all began with a tattered page from a 165-year-old family bible.
And now, 133 years after he was buried in an unmarked grave in the Pleasant Hill section of Brooklyn’s Evergreens Cemetery, Lt. John Charles Walsh (1834-1881) of the New York 28th Infantry has finally been recognized for his service to his country.
His great-great-great-grandson, Sean Walsh of Marstons Mills, Ma., a former U.S. Marine, salvaged the massive, leather-bound bible from the curbside trash on a visit to his grandparents in Florida in 1982. “My grandmother asked me to take a really cumbersome bag of trash out to the curb when I went to visit and it sort of sprang open when I plopped it down and on top was this really ancient-looking book that I just had to look at,” Walsh remembers. “I lugged it all the way home on the plane. I wasn’t letting it go for anything.”