author
Lawrence Van Alstyne
1839–1923
A Civil War veteran and local historian from Sharon, Connecticut, he turned everyday records and personal experience into books that still help readers picture 19th-century New England and wartime life. His best-known writing brings the American Civil War down to the level of one enlisted soldier's daily reality.
1 Audiobook
Diary of an Enlisted Man
by Lawrence Van Alstyne
About the author
Born in 1839, Lawrence Van Alstyne lived in Sharon, Connecticut, and died there on November 30, 1923. He is remembered both as a soldier and as a careful recorder of local and family history.
During the Civil War, he served in the 128th New York Volunteers and later in the 90th U.S. Colored Troops. His journal from those years became Diary of an Enlisted Man (1910), a firsthand account noted by the Library of Congress for its close view of camp life, illness, movement through the South, and his reactions to the war around him.
Van Alstyne also spent years preserving historical records. His books include Born, Married and Died, in Sharon, Connecticut, Lambert Janse Van Alstyne and Some of His Descendants, Burying Grounds of Sharon, Connecticut, Amenia and North East, New York, Manufacturing in Sharon, and Merchants of Sharon. Together, they show a writer deeply interested in genealogy, town history, and the lives ordinary people left behind in local records.