Described as a treasure trove of family ancestry and American history, the letters of John Ellis Wiseman Morgan and his wife, Susan Ann Morgan (nee: Hank), written in 1862, are a documentary and descriptive time trip through a short period of one of our country's most tragic and avoidable conflicts, the American Civil War. Hundreds of thousands of lives and those private worlds of homes and families were destroyed by a presidential stroke of a pen, as were the lives of my ancestors and countless others. Written in their own words and with suppressed Victorian feelings, this then is a description of life in rural (West)Virginia in 1862 during the Civil War years.