We should all be so lucky as to someday gave a great-great-great grandson like Mike Waters.

“I’ve been dabbling in this ancestry thing for some time,” said Waters, 53, as he stood Wednesday over a tiny grave site just off Two Rod Road in Scarborough.

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SCARBOROUGH, ME - OCTOBER 15: Mike Waters at his great-great-great grandfathers, Henry Farr, grave in Scarborough where he will replace a old wooden head stone with a new granite one. (Photo by John Patriquin/Staff Photographer) John Patriquin/Staff Photographer

At Waters’ feet sat a just-removed wooden grave marker, with the wrong date of death, the wrong age of the dearly departed, but the right name: Henry F. Farr.

Farr was a 31-year-old corporal in the Union Army. He died 150 years ago today at the Battle of Cedar Creek just outside Strasburg, Virginia.

How Farr’s remains ended up in Scarborough, and how Waters ended up finding this blink-and-you’ll-miss-it burial plot, is proof positive that what feels like ancient history sometimes isn’t. And that soldiers who die in battle, however long ago, need not be forgotten.

Waters, who lives in Windham and repairs copy machines for a living, grew up in the shadow of the S.D. Warren paper mill in Westbrook. His father was away with the Navy and his mother was struggling to keep her four boys in line, so Waters was raised until the age of 5 by his great-grandfather Arthur C. Farr.

Arthur Farr, who died in 1965 at the age of 73, was Cpl. Henry Farr’s grandson.

Five years ago, after misplacing a pile of handwritten notes he’d compiled over the years from oft-told family stories, Waters decided to undertake a serious genealogy search. Using various Internet sites that specialize in that sort of thing, he managed to trace the Farrs all the way back to the marriage of Henry Farr and Paulina Rounds in Auburn on Oct. 22, 1854.

“But I couldn’t find Henry after that,” Waters recalled. “I had no idea where he was. So I just went on a wild search and this ‘Henry Farr’ shows up on findagrave.com as a Union soldier way down here in Scarborough.”

Off Waters went to Scarborough, where he found the burial site in the front corner of a residential property owned by Ron Laughton.

“Do you know anything about that soldier in your front yard?” asked Waters.

“Yes, I do,” replied Laughton.

It turns out Laughton is a descendant of the Waterhouse family, which owned all of Scottow Hill in Scarborough in the years leading up to the Civil War. The family operated a large farm and built ships that, upon completion, were hauled down the hill by oxen and launched at Dunstan Landing.

Henry Farr, a shoemaker, moved down from Auburn with his young bride to work for the Waterhouses in the 1850s.

Then on Christmas Day of 1861 – spurred on by handbills all over town exhorting, “To Arms! Citizens! Our Country Calls!” – Henry and several young men from the Waterhouse clan enlisted in the 12th Maine Regiment to go and fight the Confederate States Army.

The regiment fought for two years in and around New Orleans before relocating to Virginia in 1864. There, 150 years ago this weekend, the Mainers helped Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan defeat Confederate Lt. Gen. Jubal Early and his rebel forces at Cedar Creek. It would prove to be the last major engagement of the war in Virginia’s hotly contested Shenandoah Valley.

Cpl. Henry Farr died on the final day of battle. And rather than allow him to be laid to rest in faraway Virginia, the Waterhouse family had his remains transported on ice via rail car all the way back to Maine, where he was buried in their family plot.

About 35 years ago, the four headstones that remained – including Henry’s – disappeared. Word around the neighborhood is that a man who lived nearby (he’s since died ) appropriated the stones to provide a solid foundation for his new front steps.

Enter the Boy Scouts of America, who approached Laughton in 1986 and asked if they might restore the grave site as a community service project. They erected a wooden flagpole, built a picket fence and, working off the town’s old handwritten records, installed the hand-crafted wooden marker donated by Joe Tuffs, a local sign maker.

Their intentions were pure, but their facts were a little off: The marker had Henry dying at age 21, not 31. And his date of death was inscribed as Oct. 10, 1864, rather than Oct. 19, 1864.

Waters, upon hearing from Laughton what had happened to Henry’s original gravestone and seeing how the decades had taken their toll on the Boy Scouts’ project, contacted the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ Memorial Programs Service in August to see if he might secure a proper marble headstone to permanently set the record straight.

“I felt like there was a reason I was here,” he said. “I think it was to bring respect back to a man who deserves it.”

Waters’ request was denied on the grounds that the grave already had a marker and thus was not eligible for one from the federal government.

So he appealed, noting that “the harsh winters have finally taken a toll on the wooden structure.” And besides, he noted, it contains inaccurate information.

It worked. The new headstone arrived a few weeks ago.

Meanwhile, Laughton – the Waterhouse descendant – picked up where his ancestors left off. An electrical contractor, he was chatting with the folks at The Home Depot in South Portland one day recently when Tim Hikade, the store manager, told Laughton the store’s crew was looking for a community service project to perform.

“Well, I’ve got a Union soldier in my front yard,” replied Laughton. “He could use some help.”

Over the next several days, down came the old wooden fence and flagpole. Up went a new white fence, metal flagpole and stonework around the grave. No charge.

And so it has come to pass that Sunday morning, on the 150th anniversary of his death, Cpl. Henry Farr will once again stand front and center in the hearts and minds of those who, to this day, are proud to call him one of their own.

At 9 a.m., Waters will gather with his son, Jacob, and daughters, Janessa and Julia, to set the new headstone.

Once that’s done, an honor guard from the Maine Military Funeral Honors Program will play taps and present Waters with a crisply folded American flag.

Standing by, in full Civil War regalia, will be Cpl. Rick LaJoie and Cpl. Tom Nelson of the 3rd Maine Regiment, which keeps Maine’s Civil War history alive through re-enactments and other educational programs.

Since Wednesday, others from the 3rd Maine Regiment have been on the battlefield at Cedar Creek, re-enacting the engagement that not only marked the beginning of the end of the Civil War, but also helped propel Abraham Lincoln to a landslide re-election just three weeks later.

Right around the time Henry Farr is being remembered here in Maine, the 3rd Maine will pause on the very ground where he died. There, amid the clamor of commemorated combat, they will honor Mike Waters’ great-great-great grandfather with a moment of silence.

His mission complete, Waters will then take the flag home to a room already filled with family memorabilia. He’ll place it right beside the picture of Arthur Farr – great-grandfather to Mike Waters, grandson to Henry Farr.

With that, present and past will be bridged. The shared legacy of two Maine families – the Farrs and the Waterhouses – will continue. And the once-fading memory of Cpl. Henry Farr, who died saving his country, will live on.

“It’s going to give me a lot of closure,” said Waters. “It’s my way of saying thanks.”

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