After researching my ancestor's involvements in WW I & II, Civil War, Revolution, etc, I've been meaning to write about the "erasure" effect on those who died in these conflicts. Basically, for every two ancestors that survived, another died and was forgotten. The survivors were often lucky (ie rear guard at places like Antietam, mustered out right before Gettysburg) and went on to have families, photo ops, appear in family Bibles. The unlucky ones may have been remembered by contemporaries, but often don't even have graves or markers, largely forgotten (I had a hard time tracking many). WW II vets often break down about 30 sec into interviews when "survivor guilt" sets in (my Dad went down in 1st B24 mission, his cousin/best friend in 44th, the latter didn't survive prison camp, Dad never talked about the war, out of respect/guilt?) In addition, I have Armenian and Cambodian friends who have lost track of many ancestors, showing that Genocide is frightfully effective (people don't like to talk about the dead, and of course many die too young to have kids). Someday, science will catalog all the DNA from all the mass graves of all those battles, and maybe some sense of the lineage and magnitude of it all will be established.