How A Civil War Veteran’s Story Got an Ending in 2024

Have you heard a story about a relative being the first person in the family to go to college? Maybe you are lucky enough to spend an afternoon in the kitchen with Grandma and learn the secret ingredient in her tomato sauce.

Family members can teach you about your relatives, where they came from and events through the years. These stories can also include cultural traditions, relatives overcoming challenges and funny stories about them growing up. 

Many people study and record their personal history to learn about members of their family from past and present.

Some stories from your family might feel like there are missing pieces. Cheryl Wills felt this way about what she knew about the life of her great-great-great grandfather, Sandy Wills. 

Cheryl Wills tells other people’s stories as a part of her job as an Emmy-award winning television journalist and host  for Spectrum New York 1 News, in New York City. She delivers the evening news to viewers and is the host of her talk show “In Focus with Cheryl Wills.” 

But she was searching for the missing parts of the life history of her great-great-great grandfather. Her family knew he died in 1889 but nothing about where he was buried.

“No one knew the rest of the story of Sandy Wills,” says Cheryl. “An enslaved man leaves a plantation, serves during the Civil War with Lincoln’s army, and poof!  Like it never happened.”  

Cheryl’s family, like millions of other Black Americans, left the South as part of the Great Migration. Her grandparents moved from Tennessee to New York City and through the years Cheryl asked family members about her great-great-great grandfather and their past history.

“I used to ask them: ‘What do you know about slavery?’ and they would look at me like, ‘What kind of question is that?’ ” says Cheryl.

“Those who lived through slavery, it was like they had this pact: We’re not passing this story down. You don’t want to know what it was like.”

Without any information to connect the dots, the story of Sandy Wills was never finished. 

Cheryl used public records for birth, marriage and death certificates to trace her family’s background and the life of her great-great-great grandfather started to take shape. 

Sandy Wills served as a volunteer for the United States Colored Troops in 1863. President Lincoln said without these troops the Union would not have won the war.

Wills worked as a sharecropper on the Moore plantation in Tennessee after the war. He married and had nine children. Public records showed when Sandy died, but there was no information about where he was buried.

 “He was nowhere to be found,”  says Cheryl. 

She eventually got in touch with the Moore family in Tennessee who have a huge farm with acres of fluffy cotton, soybeans and pecans. 

Cheryl believed a Civil War veteran was buried on their property and the Moore family shared that their farm had an unmarked African American burial ground on the land. 

“We had no idea it was there. We only had a hunch,” says Cheryl.

The farm became the connection for the two family stories.

The Moore family had kept the African-American gravesite on their property untouched. Other farmers told them to clear the unused land and plant on top of it. Daffodils planted by the family at the location bloom every spring and honor it as a final resting place. 

“History really meant for him to be anonymous forever,” Cheryl says. “He was a man without a legacy for 135 years. Now there is one.”

Arrangements were made to relocate the burial site of Sandy Wills from the farm to a veteran’s cemetery with a military service with family at a final resting place.

Army Private Sandy Wills, who served his country and died in 1889, was given a full military honors ceremony at a veterans’ cemetery in Memphis, Tennessee last summer.  A headstone now marks his grave at the West Tennessee State Veterans Cemetery. 

Cheryl feels the story of Sandy Wills finally has an ending and an honorable legacy to live on. 

You can watch the whole story on CBS Sunday Morning here. 

Cheryl Wills is an Emmy Award-winning journalist for Spectrum News NY1. As the first African American woman to host a prime-time nightly newscast for the cable network, Cheryl anchors the Emmy-nominated broadcast “Live at Ten” on weeknights.

Cheryl has been with NY1 since its launch in 1992 and is one of the station’s most recognizable journalists for breaking news and special coverage. She is also the talk show host of the weekly public affairs program “In Focus with Cheryl Wills,” where she interviews the most powerful newsmakers and elected officials in the country.

Cheryl is also the acclaimed author of a series of books about her family’s transition from slavery to freedom in the United States. “Die Free: A Heroic Family Tale,” “The Emancipation of Grandpa Sandy Wills,” “Emancipated: My Family’s Fight for Freedom,” and “EMMA” all chronicle her three-times great-grandfather’s heroic service as a member of the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War.