The 146th anniversary of the Battle of Chickamauga occurred recently, and it was of special interest to me. It was because of that battle that my greatgrandfather met my greatgrandmother and went on to became a doctor, and I've always been fascinated how our personal history was affected by world history.

Patrick Henry Burke was 23, the age of my younger son now, when he reported for duty at Buckner Hospital in Ringgold, Georgia a year before the great battle. The third son of four, he'd left the family store in Stewart County, southwest Georgia, having gotten a plum assignment in General Bragg's Army in Chattanooga.

As the hospital steward at Buckner Hospital, he was in charge of ensuring a steady stream of supplies for the hospital's staff and patients as it received casualties from the fighting in Tennessee. As such, he procured and dispensed medical, surgical, and hospital supplies under direction of the regimental medical officer. I've seen his hand-written receipts in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., as he paid for beef, beans, and butter early in the war, then bandages, dressings, chloroform, morphine, and whiskey through the battles, then more and more often for coffins and gravediggers.

But the hospital was in Ringgold. How did he meet, woo, and marry my great-grandmother, Sarah Colbert, in Newnan, Georgia, some 130 miles south?

For years, this was a mystery, but thanks to several old books being put online by Google, I've made the connection. Just before the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863, the brigade's hospitals were ordered to pack up and move south by rail to several cities along the line, just like modern MASH hospitals. In less than 72 hours after the order came, each 250-500 bed general hospital relocated by rail to a city over 100 miles south.

And that's how my great-grandparents got together: Ringgold's Buckner Hospital had just packed up and arrived in Newnan, and of course the good families of Newnan opened their homes to the hospital and surgical staff.

Sarah Colbert, the fourth child of the late Rev. Thomas Colbert from Wilkes County, was of the age and social strata to take part in welcoming the newcomers, and somewhere in there, as thousands of soldiers wounded at Chickamauga streamed though the hospital, Sarah met, was courted by, and fell in love with Patrick Henry Burke.

Within a year of their meeting, another momentous change had come for my great-grandfather - he applied to medical school. He was accepted at the medical school in Richmond, and ordered to Howard's Grove Hospital where he was mustered as a medical student for the last year of the war.

Apparently the post-war medical profession accommodated students from the destroyed South, because my great-grandfather returned to Georgia with a medical degree from the prestigious University of Pennsylvania in 1866.

As a child, I always loved the bloody family legends, about how Dr. Pat, as everyone called him, was Stewart County's best sawbones doc ever. "Doctor Pat didn't care what color you were, or if you had a cent, he'd put you back together and sew you up," they'd say.

But I'd never known how they met, and now that mystery's solved. Dr. Pat's life, his war, his wife, are only small parts of the grand sweep of American history, but they're a big part of my family's history, and I hope the stories are told forever.