Amos Humiston was killed in action during the American Civil War on the Gettysburg Battlefield, dying with his children's image that his wife had mailed to him months earlier. A local girl found the image, and Dr. J. Francis Bournes saw it at her father's tavern and subsequently promoted the File: "wounded, he had laid himself down to die. In his hands…was an ambrotype containing the portraits of three small children… [It is] desired that all papers in the country will draw attention [so] the family…may come into possession of it" (The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 19, 1863).