AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTERTWENTY-THREE
The Arundel Armory was an old brick building with a creaky door that opened to a modest Civil War museum. Andie expected to find an old war veteran at the desk, but instead a young woman with heavy dark eyeliner, jet-black hair in a long ponytail, and an all-black outfit greeted her. Her name was Patty, according to the tag on her shirt.
“Hi. I was told you have Civil War archives with listings of the soldiers and their families.”
Patty’s dark brow quirked up, and she looked skeptical. “You want to dig around in there?”
Dig around? Andie was hoping for something with a computer screen. “I think so. I came across some discharge papers for a Civil War soldier and want to locate his descendants.”
“Okee doke. The archives are over here.”
Patty led her to a room in the back. It was chock-full of old, dusty boxes with brittle yellowed papers. Andie was afraid to even touch any of them and aghast that they were kept in this condition.
“We’re working on moving them to digital.” Patty moved some of the papers from the top of a box, seemingly uninterested that the paperwork was disintegrating before her very eyes.
“I think you’d better hurry.” Andie carefully opened a folder and took a piece of paper out, the edge crumbling beneath her fingers.
“They’re more interested in the displays.” Patty gestured toward the museum section with its tanks and guns and uniforms.
Voices emanated from the lobby, and Patty ran off to tend to them, leaving Andie with the archives. She studied the labels on the boxes, trying to figure out where to start. The boxes had a range of dates, so she started with the one that had the dates coinciding with the discharge papers.
Fortunately, the actual papers inside weren’t as old as the mid-1800s. It looked like most of the information had been recorded or transcribed in the 1950s and filed in folders according to town. Sorting through the papers was tedious work, and after a few hours, she was about to give up when she finally found a lead on her guy.
She followed a paper trail for another hour. Apparently, Robert Koslachowski had been married and had one son. That son, Edward, had a son and daughter. The daughter had died before having any children, but the son had had two sons, and the last records of him were that they’d lived in the county. Unfortunately, that was where the family tree ended. There were no records of the two sons getting married, having children, or dying. At least not any that Andie could find.
Where did the two sons go? Andie made a mental note to check into the county records. The Civil War archives might not go that far, but surely the county would have some records. At least she knew that Robert had descendants, and, even though the trail ended, these records were old and incomplete. So it was back to the library with the new information to try to pick up the trail.
