With help from ‘History Detectives,’ S.F. man discovers his great-great-grandfather’s service in the Civil War

A Santa Fe man’s questions into his family background — including his great-great-grandfather’s service in the Civil War — have been answered by a national television show.

George Geder said the story began when a total stranger, Angelo Scarloto of Etters, Pa., bought a vintage photograph at an antique shop.

It depicts 26 men in their 50s or older, wearing medals from the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal association of Union soldiers. Two men are black; the other 24 are white.

Civil War buff Scarloto “was curious about that because, given the tenor of the times, he thought it unusual for these two African Americans to be in this photograph,” Geder said.

History Detectives, a Public Broadcasting Service program in its fifth season, puts it in stronger terms in a news release: “In Reconstructionist-era America, association between blacks and whites was frequently taboo. So what brought them together for this portrait?”

Scarloto contacted the History Detectives, whose researchers determined the photograph had been taken in Cazenovia, N.Y., in the late 1800s.

The researchers learned that three black men from Cazenovia, a small town near Syracuse, had served in the Union Army during the Civil War. They identified one of the men in the photo but couldn’t identify the other.

Cazenovia librarians and historians suggested that History Detectives contact Geder, who was known on message boards in the Cazenovia area for his research into his own family history there.

Geder, 55 — who moved to Santa Fe from Oakland, Calif., last year after retiring from his job as a station agent with the Bay Area Rapid Transit system — said the researchers soon called him to ask if he had a photograph of his relatives. He did — a 1907 shot of his father, then 4 years old, sitting on the lap of his great-grandfather, John Stevenson, while his mother and father stood on either side.

The History Detectives determined that Stevenson was the same man depicted in Scarloto’s photo of the Civil War veterans taken a few decades earlier.

Geder said he had not been able to find out much about his father’s side of the family. For example, he didn’t know his great-great-grandfather had served in the Civil War. He said he inherited the album of family photos after his father died in 1977 and was not even sure of the identity of the man holding his father on his lap. Geder began to learn more in February, when the History Detectives flew him and his wife, Cynthia, to Cazenovia.

As it turned out, Stevenson grew up in Cazenovia but went to Connecticut to volunteer for the U.S. Army’s 29th infantry regiment — made up of black enlisted men and white officers.

The Confederacy’s early victories in the Civil War had Union officers appealing to Congress to enlist free blacks. “But the politics of the day was, ‘No, we’re not going to have the blacks wearing uniforms and fighting. We’re not going to give them guns because they might use them on us later,’ ” Geder said.

Nevertheless, Stevenson’s “colored” regiment saw battle in Virginia, where he was wounded in the left thigh by a bullet. After the Civil War ended, he was mustered out of the Army in Texas and returned to Cazenovia, where he took up farming.

But the injury plagued him. Geder said research turned up Stevenson’s pleas for a larger pension due to his disability. “As he got older, he could do less farming,” Geder said. “So he kept making appeals.”

Geder said the History Detectives episode — which airs at 9 p.m. Monday on KNME-TV, Channel 5 — includes a re-enactment of a Civil War battle filmed in New York City and ends with Geder meeting Scarloto in Cazenovia.

“They tell (Scarloto), ‘We figured out who the people were in the picture. Not only that, we located a descendant.’ Then they had me walk into the scene,” Geder said. “It’s a thrilling moment. He’s surprised because he doesn’t know that they had this in store. And I’m surprised. ... It’s just a wonderful time.”

Before the Geders returned to New Mexico, they stopped at a Cazenovia cemetery to visit Stevenson’s grave and those of other ancestors.

Geder said the program never answers, to his satisfaction, why the group was integrated. But History Detectives attributes the camaraderie to the Grand Army of the Republic, one of the first racially integrated groups in the country. The program says the bonding of men in battle transcended the differences of race.

Contact Tom Sharpe at 995-3813 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.