Letters reveal pain of those left behind. In the weeks following the July 1863 Battle of Gettysburg, tens of thousands of families waited anxiously for word of the fate of their loved ones and friends serving in the contending armies. Had they been killed in the fighting? Had they survived only to suffer from agonizing wounds in crude, makeshift hospitals? The vivid contemporary evidence, found in the pension files for two Pennsyl-vania soldiers who fell at Gettysburg, sheds light on two different families’ ordeals in the aftermath of the Civil War’s largest battle.