LEVEL -- It was about dinnertime, two days after Memorial Day, when Joyce Hilton Bransford Byrd opened a letter that changed her family's life.

It was only a few typed paragraphs, announcing a park rededication in eastern Harford County. Officials were renaming Gravel Hill Park, north of Havre de Grace, to pay homage to native son Alfred B. Hilton, who received the Medal of Honor for his valor during the Civil War.

The letter writer, a member of the Historical Society of Harford County, said he thought Hilton might be related to Byrd's family.

Amazed, the 70-year-old retired teacher looked at the name and thought, "It's got to be a relative of mine."

He is. Hilton, a U.S. Colored Troops sergeant and one of only two Medal of Honor winners from Harford County, is her great-great-great-uncle.

"It was awesome for me," Byrd said of the discovery, which has started an exciting, bittersweet journey for her and her family, descendants of one of the county's first free black families.

Little is known about Hilton. No one has seen his picture, no medal exists in the family's keepsakes, and relatives who might have remembered stories of the laborer-turned-soldier, including Byrd's mother, Aurora Dingus Bransford, have died.

"If Mama was here, she'd be talking a mile a minute," Byrd said. "My mother was the historian. She loved people, and she loved the Hilton family."

But as in all families, time takes the storytellers of older generations, leaving the younger ones sometimes lost in the lineage. Hilton was a relative on her father's side, and after he died in 1969, Byrd's mother slowly lost touch with the Hilton cousins. Though Byrd and her four brothers and sisters knew a Hilton had fought in the Civil War, his story had slipped away.

He grew up just a few miles away on land still owned by the family -- across the street from the rededicated park. That's how historical society member Mike Pierce, whose hobby is researching land records, found family members.

He had mailed the letter to Aurora Bransford, whose daughter Judith Muhammed lives in the family home in Baltimore. Muhammed, who was ill, forwarded it to her sister, Joyce Byrd, who went to the ceremony May 30 with her son Peter, who lives in Havre de Grace.

At the ceremony, Byrd met James Chrismer, a history teacher at the John Carroll School in Bel Air and a member of the county Historic Preservation Commission. It was his research that led to the park's rededication.

Chrismer recalls feeling "a chill up my spine" when he met Byrd that morning and began to share what he has learned in more than two years of research about Hilton.

Using census reports, land records, letters and other documents, Chrismer has shed light on Hilton's life. He told the soldier's story in the 60-page fall 2000 Harford Historical Bulletin, which provided the basis for this brief account of his life:

Hilton was born in the 1830s or 1840s to former slaves Isaac and Harriet Hilton and lived on the family's 14-acre farm. He may have had as many as 14 siblings, including his older brother Henry, who was Joyce Byrd's great-great-great-grandfather.

Faced with few prospects as a laborer -- and pressured to prove his loyalty to the Union -- Hilton joined the Army in Baltimore in 1863 as a sergeant in Company H of the 4th Regiment Infantry, U.S. Colored Troops, Maryland Volunteers. A fellow sergeant described Hilton, who was nearly 6 feet tall, as "a magnificent specimen of manhood."

He drilled and trained, but like most black soldiers, he spent much of his early military career doing the hard and dirty work of war -- digging canals and building fortifications.

That changed in 1864, when Hilton's regiment joined a monthslong drive to cut supply lines between Petersburg, Va., and Richmond, Va., and stage attacks on the Confederate capital from the south. In September, the 4th Regiment joined eight other black corps on the shore of the James River for an assault on entrenched Confederate soldiers at the base of New Market Heights, a strategic hill overlooking the main road to Richmond from the east.

The Battle of New Market Heights is little-known beyond scholarly circles. It is often confused with a Shenandoah Valley battle fought in 1863 or lumped into historical records with combat at nearby Chapins Farm.

Yet it was at this site southeast of Richmond that Alfred Hilton made his mark as a Union soldier.

He had the highly visible -- and high-risk -- role of carrying the national colors for his regiment. And he led the charge with the 350 men of the 4th Regiment that fall day through woods and swamp, into a barrage of enemy artillery. Christian A. Fleetwood of the 4th Regiment later described the gunfire as "sweeping men down as hailstones sweep the leaves from the trees."

Despite heavy fire, Hilton breached the first barricade of the enemy line, where the guard carrying the regiment's colors lay wounded. He picked up the second standard, hefting the two flags as he pressed deeper into the Confederate line, until, he too, was shot.

At battle's end, the Union soldiers held the hilltop. Hilton made it back to the federal camp and was taken to Fort Monroe, Va., where his wounded leg was amputated. He died there Oct. 21, from complications related to the amputation -- a common cause of death for Civil War soldiers, Chrismer said. He was buried in the hospital cemetery in Hampton, Va.

Hilton received the Medal of Honor posthumously April 6, 1865, three days before Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered, largely because of comments written by Maj. Augustus S. Boernstein, white commander of the 4th Regiment. He praised Hilton's bravery for taking up both color standards and shouting as he fell, "Boys, save the colors!"

"He was a good faithful soldier," Boernstein wrote.

Hilton was one of 16 black soldiers in the Civil War to receive the nation's highest military honor, which was instituted in 1861 and awarded to 1,523 soldiers, according to government and Congressional Medal of Honor Society records. Today, 3,439 soldiers have received Medals of Honor. Hilton is one of 83 recipients from Maryland.

But what happened to Hilton's medal remains a mystery.

Joyce Byrd's son, Joel, said he is going to find out. "There has to be a record, what physically happened to this medal," he said. "I can't imagine that people in my family would just forget about something like that."

More likely, Hilton's parents never knew their son won the medal, said Chrismer.

In those days, he said, people traveled to Washington to claim relatives' medals. As a poor, free black family, "they were not likely to have been notified. They were not likely to have gone to Washington to get it." On a steamy morning last week, Joyce Byrd, Joel Byrd and Deborah Tisdale, her niece, sat with Chrismer on her front porch, looking out at the rolling farmland that spreads out along Green Spring Road and talking about the Civil War hero who brought them all together.

Joel Byrd, a loan officer who lives in Baltimore County, says hearing his great-great-great-great-uncle's story reminds him that the problems Americans face today are nothing like what his ancestor faced. As he and Chrismer huddled over a record of Harford County U.S. Colored Troops soldiers, Byrd said he is determined to get to know his ancestors better.

His mother said she knows of several Hilton cousins, retired police officers, in the Philadelphia area. She is thinking about taking out an ad in the Inquirer to try to find them.

And she is going to join the historical society.

"This is possible because of the work they do," she said.

For Chrismer, the events of the past few weeks infuse the passion for history he has had for decades.

"Now I have a very special feeling, seeing the enthusiasm and pride that my work and the park's dedication have brought to Mrs. Byrd and her family."