My great grandfather Edward P. Stanley in an iPhone camera copy of a tintype photo taken in the late 1850s-early 1860s. The image, as with all tintypes, is reversed. E.P. was a private in the Minutemen of Attala from the inception of the 13th Regiment in 1861 until the May, 1864, Battle of the Wilderness where he lost part of one leg to a bounding cannonball.

After the war Edward became a circuit-riding Methodist minister and farmer who married and begat four children. He was a friend of Newt Nash, another Minuteman, who mentioned Edward in one of his letters home as having joined the Methodist church in the popular religious revivals at Fredericksburg in the winter of 1862-63. Born in 1837, he died in 1900, possibly from complications of his wartime amputation which was not an uncommon problem. He’s buried in Lexington, Mississippi.