The Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War photographs in the Library of Congress contains more than a thousand ambrotype and tintype portraits of regular soldiers, most of them unknown.
The teenage Liljenquist boys collected the photos over a decade at auctions, estate sales, specialty shops and e-bay, seeking out "high quality images to represent the impact of the war, especially the young enlisted men."
Brandon Liljenquist explains that "in the summer of 2009, The Washington Post published deeply moving photos of U.S. servicemen killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Upon seeing them, Jason and I were struck with an idea. We envisioned a way to use our own collection of photos as a Civil War memorial."
They decided to donate their collection to the Library of Congress, which created a special exhibit of the photos in 2011.
According to the Library of Congress, "The photographs often show hats, firearms, canteens, musical instruments, painted backdrops, and other details that enhance the research value of the collection. - Among the rarest images are African Americans in uniform."
As Brandon Liljenquist explains, "Laying out the photographs at home for the last time, and thinking about the collection in a whole new light, I couldn't help but notice how similar the faces of these soldiers were to those we'd seen in The Washington Post. These were the young men who did most of the fighting and dying. In their eyes and the eyes of their loved ones, I could see the full range of human emotion. It was all here: the bravado, the fear, the readiness, the weariness, the pride and the anguish. The loneliness in their long, distant stares overwhelmed me."
The gallery of 25 images below was selected from the online collection, cropped and toned for easier viewing. The captions are from the Library of Congress online catalogue descriptions.
There is no indication that any of them fought at Gettysburg, and no indication they didn't, no indication whether they were killed, wounded or survived the war - they are unknown.
Click on the "caption" button below this gallery for the descriptions to appear, or visit the full-size PennLive photo gallery here: Unknown Yankees
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