William Henry Snell
William Henry Snell was born at Wareham, Plymouth County, Massachusetts, on 4 November 1836. Wareham was a nail-making town, with rolling mills and nail works along its rivers, and William learned the trade. He was a nailer, a man who tended the machines that cut nails from strips of iron.
On 14 November 1861, at twenty-five, he enlisted as a private in Company A of the 20th Massachusetts Infantry. The 20th was raised in the summer of 1861 and served in the Army of the Potomac. In 1862 it fought through the Peninsula campaign in Virginia and at Antietam and Fredericksburg. William was present at every muster from November 1861 through June 1862. In July and August 1862 he was in the hospital himself. Through the autumn he was on detached service at the division hospital. From November 1862 he served with the ambulance train, the wagons that carried the wounded off the field, as the regiment went into the December fighting at Fredericksburg.
He was discharged at Boston on 14 April 1863. His discharge gave the reason as disability from phthisis, the old word for tuberculosis of the lungs.
A year later, on 13 May 1864, he married Maria Bridge Tripp at Wareham. She was fifteen, born at Scituate and raised at Wareham. They had eight children: William G., born in 1864, Ellen J., Estella May, Francis R., Jesse E., born in 1874, Helen, Maude and George L., born in 1883. William went back to the nail works.
He died at Wareham on 20 January 1888, aged fifty-one, of Bright's disease, an illness of the kidneys. He was still a nailer. He was buried at Agawam Cemetery in Wareham, in Section A, Lot 9, under a government headstone carved with the Union shield. Maria lived on as his widow for thirty-five years.
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Cite: Heirology, "William Henry Snell (1836-1888)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/william-henry-snell-1836-1888-4ddf9b.