America's Civil War has an article about a
Civil War soldier from an unlikely place:
More than a hundred native Hawai'ians are known to have served in the Civil War, but most are lost to history because they fought under anglicized names. But one, J.R. Kealoha, was identified and honored in October of 2014 in a Honolulu, Hawai'i cemetary.
Kealoha died in 1877, but any headstone had long since been lost. That bothered Anita Manning, an associate in cultural studies at Honolulu's Bishop Museum, who stumbled across Kealoha's war and burial records in 2011, but found no tombstone in the cemetery. "I was immediately struck that this man, who had put himself in harm's war for my future, had been forgotten," Manning told Hawai'i News Now.
A group of historians petitioned the Veterans Administration for a headstone and, after three years of red tape, Kealoha, who fought for the Union, got his own stone (photo).
Kealoha's name was known only because of a twist of fate: a chance meeting with a fellow Hawai'ian, future Union General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, who noted the conversation in a letter to his family. (His father was a missionary in Hawai'i.)
Hawai'i was a sovereign nation when the War broke out and, although its leaders sympathized with the South, prudence prevailed, and Hawai'i declared its neutrality.
Rico says his stepmother was born in Hawai'i; he sent her the article (not that she cares about the
Civil War, but she might about this guy),
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