The first Civil War casualty to be buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn was a 12-year-old drummer for a New York regiment. Clarence McKenzie, a local boy fatally wounded in an accidental shooting in Maryland, was buried June 14, 1861, two months after the Union garrison at Fort Sumter surrendered to Confederate forces.

Today, the 478-acre expanse of greenery and statuary covering the cemetery's rolling hills is believed to be the final resting place of about 8,000 Civil War veterans. A team of volunteers and Green-Wood staff has spent nearly a decade trying to identify all those graves. When the project began in September 2002, cemetery officials figured they had, at most, 500 veterans of the nation's bloodiest war buried here.

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