Karen Mclaughlin Cuccinello

Spanish American War Veterans with Connections to Schoharie County, NY Karen Mclaughlin Cuccinello

Over 150 men with families, farms and business' volunteered to leave their homes in upstate New York to fight for Cuba's independence in 1898. They were leaving everything that they were accustomed to for a salary of $15 per month. The biographies of these Schoharie County men includes first hand accounts of the war through letters home to loved ones, some illustrations, histories about their lives after the war and a basic family tree. The majority of the bios list the soldiers travels from start to finish, in other words birth to death (most were born in the 1870's). This book is about the real living and breathing men that went to the war, not an in-depth history of the war. The veterans, listed in alphabetical order, were either: born, died, lived, buried or had immediate family in Schoharie County. Of the 154 men who volunteered to serve: Four men died in the service to our country and three died from disease, about a dozen made the military a career, three lived into their 90's, the last of the three died in 1971, the oldest was born in 1845, two also served in the Civil War, seven also served in WWI, two also served in WWII, there were four sets of brothers, two father and son combo's and five went to West Point. Some of the men lived long and prosperous lives and some were not so fortunate. When I first started this project I figured I would just contact a military organization and get a master list of the Schoharie County guys who served, but this was most definitely not reality. There is no such list and no unit formed in Schoharie County so every guy had to be discovered individually through a multitude of sources . The information listed is everything that I could find from: newspapers (hard copy, online and microfilm), history books of the towns, Fold3.com, familysearch.com, US Military academy, conversations with historians, cemeteries, libraries etc. etc. The length of the bio depends on availability of information discovered. The initial call for volunteers began in 1898 for the Cuban part of the war but men continued to volunteer for conflicts in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii and China until about 1910.