Carleton Young was going through boxes in his parents’ Churchill attic in 2006 when he made quite a discovery.

“Inside the wooden box was an enormous collection of about 250 letters written home by two Vermont brothers as they fought in the Civil War,” Young said. “They were members of the Vermont Brigade, which became renowned for its courage and fighting ability.”

The brothers, William Henry Martin and Francis S. Martin, were from Williamstown, Vt. Young will delve into their letters when he visits the Murrysville Historical Preservation Society on Nov. 18.

Young and his wife were joined by three friends in reading through and transcribing the letters. It was a difficult process thanks to what was called “cross-writing.”

“After filling up a page, to save paper they would turn the letter sideways and write directly across what they’d already written,” Young said. “It took us several years to get them completely transcribed.”

With a doctorate in history from the University of Pittsburgh and a 37-year career teaching history at Thomas Jefferson High School, Young was certainly up for the challenge.

“They fought in many of the most famous battles of the Civil War, including the Peninsula Campaign, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Petersburg and Cedar Creek,” Young said.

He spent more than a decade visiting those and other battlefields to retrace the Martin brothers’ steps during the war.

“Park rangers and historians were always surprised at the depth of the observations and insights in these letters,” Young said. “We also made several trips to Vermont to research our soldiers as well as other friends and family members they mentioned in the letters.”

That research resulted in Young’s 2015 book “Voices from the Attic: The Williamstown Boys in the Civil War.”

Over the past two years, Young has traveled to more than 200 historical societies in nine states to present and discuss the letters.

Young said he couldn’t understand why his parents had the letters in the first place.

“I had never heard of any relatives with the last name of Martin,” he said. “And I could not imagine why, with my interest in history, that my father had never mentioned to me that he had this box of Civil War letters in the attic.”

After extensive research in Montpelier, Vt., Young learned that the Martin brothers were from his grandfather’s first marriage.

The discovery couldn’t have happened at a better time.

“As I was approaching retirement, I was uncertain about what exactly I would do,” Young said. “And, then, I just fell right into this.”

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