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This now-iconic image of the family of Sgt. Samuel Smith, an African-American soldier wearing an Abraham Lincoln campaign pin, is a featured photo on Wikimedia Commons and was donated to the Library of Congress as part of the Liljenquist Collection

This image of A. M. Chandler and Silas Chandler was purchased from Chandler descendants and owned by the Liljenquists "for about 10 minutes" before it was donated to the Library of Congress

Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. is a collection of photographs and ephemera related to the American Civil War. The bulk of the collection is ambrotypes, tintypes, and cartes de visite of individual soldiers and officers from both sides of the conflict.

Background

The Liljenquist Collection was the basis of the 2011 Library of Congress exhibit The Last Full Measure: Civil War Photographs from the Liljenquist Family Collection, which was organized to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War. Many of the photographs have been dispersed over time from their families of origin and lack identifications, so the Library of Congress created a Flickr stream and has a contact email for the collection, as it is actively soliciting potential IDs from genealogists and volunteer Civil War researchers. Community identifications have been made, either tentatively, or conclusively, such as a "famous" photo of a Confederate that was initially cataloged as identified but that was familiar to hard-core Georgia historians, and a group photograph that was connected with Company H of 124th New York Volunteer Infantry—an image, as it happened, that included a future Congressman and a Medal of Honor winner.

The collection, still in progress, has been assembled and donated by McLean, Virginia business owner Tom Liljenquist and his three sons, Jason Liljenquist, Brandon Liljenquist, and Christian Liljenquist. Liljenquist owns four jewelry and watch boutiques in the Delmarva area of the United States. The family assembled the first 700 items in the archive through online auctions and visiting Civil War memorabilia vendors. Research into a drummer boy from Maine who wrote of serving three years "with the greatest army that was ever known" and died at age 21 of complications from malaria was part of what inspired the Liljenquists to donate their assembled collection to the Library. Ambrotypes, an early photographic process with a unique "tonality," were an early focus of the family collection. The collection now numbers more than 7,000 items and the family continues to make donations of new items.