John N. Osgood....who are you?

Ebay struck again. Now I have another Osgood mystery on my hands.

I bid and won a photo of a "John N. Osgood." I don't think he is a direct ancestor of mine. The last John Osgood in my direct line died in 1725. But I went ahead and bid on the item, thinking that if I did win it, perhaps I could find out who he was. At the very least, I could upload the photo to DeadFred.com and hopefully help another family researcher out there.

I have a book on CD-Rom entitled, "A Genealogy of the Descendants of John, Christopher, and William Osgood." It was compiled by Ira Osgood and tracks the descendants through 1890's. It's a pretty good resource, but I find it a little difficult to navigate as a PDF document. Being over 500 pages, its hard to quickly browse for specific information.

Be that as it may, I looked "John N. Osgood" up in the index. There is one listed, born on 26 March 1843 in Bradford, Maine. He was a soldier in the Union army and died in a hospital in Hampton, Virginia on 15 Sept 1864. (Interesting side note--this John's brother in law died of starvation at Andersonville prison).

Could this be that John? I don't know much about dating photographs. (Perhaps I need to contact the Photo Detective, Maureen Taylor.) It may be that this photo was taken prior to 1864.

There were three original Osgood immigrants to the New World in the 1630's: John, Christopher, and William. All Osgood's in this country can trace their ancestry back to one of these three men. John's family and William's family both came to America aboard the same ship, "Confidence" in 1638. They were probably related, although there are various explanations as to exactly how. The John N. Osgood in the book was a descendant of William Osgood. I am a descendant of John Osgood. Even if we assume this John and the John in the book are the same...the exact relationship is still unknown since the relationship between the immigrant John and William are not known.

Of course, I am very open to other identifications of the man in this photo. Do you know who he is?