I really don’t know why they didn’t just call it Clara Barton Day, but here we are.

The Red Cross has its PR problems.  Clara Barton probably did too, but from this remove, she was a pretty impressive character. When we lived in Virginia, we visited the Missing Soldiers Office Museum in Washington, D.C., which will really fire your imagination if you are remotely into historical fiction.

In early1865, Barton was in DC caring for her nephew, who was a sickly government employee. He learned that the government needed help notifying the relatives of those who were missing or had died in captivity, mentioned this to Barton, and she was off to the races. She petitioned Lincoln for an official position to find those who had vanished during the conflict. He gave her the job of listing the names of those who died in captivity and notifying their families. She went to Annapolis, where freed Union soldiers were being processed after release from Confederate prisons. It was total chaos, and official record-keeping pretty much sucked. So she interviewed soldiers herself.

On the other end, she was getting literally thousands of letters from families looking for information. She hired a few assistants with her own money (expecting the government to reimburse her, which took only two years, ha ha—and refusing donations from families). Inquiries received a form letter response acknowledging receipt.

Barton’s first master list of soldiers who had disappeared during the Civil War came out in June 1865 and listed 1,533 names. When she wrapped things up 1868, the list was up to 6,650 names.

A side note on this was Barton’s trip to Andersonville, where Dorence Atwater, a prisoner who had been tasked with keeping an official list of those who died—no small task when up to 50 men a day were dying there. He also kept a secret copy for himself. How those 12,000 names were made public is too long to post here, but someone really needs to make a movie about that story and about Atwater because his life has all the great elements: drama, suspense, and a bonzer happy ending in Tahiti.

Anyway, Barton stuck with it until 1868; according to the museum’s website, the Missing Soldiers Office over the span of four years “had received 63,182 inquiries, written 41,855 letters, mailed 58,693 printed circulars, distributed 99,057 copies of her printed rolls, and identified 22,000 men.”

If there aren’t novels to be found in that fodder, there aren’t novels to be found.