SHILOH, N.C.-James Jennings sat in his regiment's camp and wrote a letter home with a quill pen.
"Dear Mother," it began.
"It is with heartfelt sorrow and deep regret that I have to announce to you the death of brother Harney," Jennings wrote. "He was pierced by a bullet on Friday evening in the charge."
Six days earlier, he had seen his younger brother killed in the bloody Civil War battle at Ware Bottom Church south of Richmond.
The May 26, 1864, letter is one of only two known from James.
Jennings' correspondence was placed in a small, leather-covered wooden box that sat on a buffet-type cabinet for decades and was forgotten.
That's until descendant Ima Jennings died in 2011. Her heirs administered the will and divided what was left.
"Nobody wanted the box," said Carolyn Jennings, wife of Clarence, who is a great-grandson of James. "Nobody knew what was in it."
Clarence and Carolyn Jennings took the box home and sifted through the contents. They found a variety of century-old keepsakes, including an ancestor's love letters from 1909, a $10 gold piece and a lock of blond hair from a young girl in the family who died of diphtheria.
James Jennings' letter was in a yellowed envelope near the bottom.
His descendants decided recently to make the letter public.
Clarence Jennings sat at his kitchen table in his Camden home last week with his ancestor's correspondence framed behind museum-quality glass lying next to the well-worn box.
"We had no knowledge of that particular letter," he said.
James Jennings left behind a big family after surviving four wives. He died at 70 in 1900. Another part of the Jennings family set a new stone at his grave west of Elizabeth City in a ceremony three years ago.
Jennings and his brothers, William Harney and Decatur, enlisted in the 56th North Carolina Infantry Regiment in 1862 as part of Company C, known as the Pasquotank Boys. The unit fought in eastern North Carolina, including the battle at Plymouth, before marching to Virginia.
The Jennings brothers endured hardships with the rest of the 56th Regiment. Clarence Jennings' great-great-grandfather, Lemuel Jackson, from his mother's line, was also in the unit.
One soldier wrote that the bread was so hard he could "nock a bull down" with it, according to an account in "North Carolina Troops 1861-1865."
Members of the unit "were shoeless" and "slogged through several inches of snow" to a camp near Tarboro in 1862.
The brothers were together when the unit charged into Union lines at Ware Bottom Church on May 20, 1864. The men drove the enemy back "under a terrible hail of bullets," but 90 soldiers in Jennings' unit were killed or wounded.
"The 56th suffered very badly and the company was cut up pretty bad," he wrote.
The surviving brothers were captured within days of Gen. Robert E. Lee's surrender to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox in April 1865. They were released two months later.
"The letter ties us back to our families," Clarence Jennings said.