In the 1970s, I worked with a guy from North Carolina (G.T.) who spent much of his free time tracing his family tree.  One of our coworkers, who was black, would tease him that he'd better watch out or he'd find a black ancestor on that tree.  One day, G.T. came in and told our friend that he had found something even worse: one of his ancestors was a Yankee! 

Chances are if your family has been in the U.S. since the mid-1800s, you have people who fought in the Civil War. And because of the type of war it was, it was not unusual for members of a family to be pitted against each other.  It was a dark time in our history.  All of my close relatives were in Virginia & North Carolina and fought for the Confederacy.  But I, too, have discovered relatives on both sides of the Civil War.

I may have mentioned before that some of my information comes from a manuscript that was written in the late 1800s. One entry is:

"Jannetta Waddell Alexander married Colonel John J. McCook of the fighting McCook family in the law firm of Alexander & Green, New York City."

Thanks to the Internet, I discovered that the "Fighting McCooks" consisted of two McCook brothers and 13 of their sons from Ohio, all of whom fought for the Union Army. 

One of the sons was the John J. McCook who married my third cousin three times removed.  Here is a picture of McCook in his uniform.

After the Civil War, McCook joined the law firm of Alexander & Green in New York.  He and his wife are both buried in a cemetery at Princeton, where many other Alexanders are buried.  Here is Janetta's obituary from the New York Times.