John Kierstead, Company G
Kierstead was born in 1842 in Michigan. He was 18 years old when he was recruited by Captain Theodore Brown for service in the Fifty-First Illinois in February, 1864, at the time of the regiment's reenlistment furlough. Kierstead was mustered out at the end of the regiment's career in September, 1865. He died on June 27, 1909 and was buried at Valley Brook Cemetery in Breckinridge, Colorado.

Jacob Lane, Company F
Lane was born in 1838 in St. Lawrence County New York. He was enrolled in George Bellows' infantry company in March 1862. Bellows' company became Company F of the Fifty-First Illinois and joined the regiment in the field in July 1862. At the time of enrollment, Lane was a twenty-two year old farmer living in Mason County, Iowa. He mustered out of the regiment in June, 1865. Lane died in 1907 and was buried at Hill Top Cemetery in Pagosa Springs, Archuleta County, Colorado.

John Reed, Company E
According to Reed's military records and the Boulder, Co. geneaology web-pages, Reed was born in Ohio on November 25, 1838. He was living in Vermilion County, Illinois at the time John McWilliams (later captain, Company E) enrolled him for military service on November 11, 1861. He was single and a farmer by occupation at the time. For the first two years of his service with the Fifty-First Illinois, Reed was healthy, not wounded, and always present for duty. On September 19, 1863, he was severely wounded by a gunshot wound in the arm at Chickamauga; he escaped capture and recuperated in a military hospital in Nashville. He recovered well enough to continue his service with the regiment as a member of the ambulance corps to which he was assigned on May 2, 1864, just as the Georgia campaign was getting underway. Reed did not reenlist; he was in Nashville in the hospital when his comrades were re-enlisting in East Tennessee in late December. He mustered out of the service on January 16, 1865 when his term of service expired. He was in the hospital at Louisville at the time, and his discharge papers were not properly completed: "No discharge furnished - he being accounted for as absent and should have been discharged in Hospt. not having been sent to join his Regiment before the 'non-veterans' were mustered out." In the upshot, Reed secured the services of an agent to steer the matter through the military bureaucracy and get his discharge papers, the papers without which there was no pension or other access to government benefits for veterans.

After the war, Reed continued farming. He spent the last 30 years of his life in Boulder, Colorado, dying there at home on March 27, 1919 of arteriosclerosis. His grave is located at A89-1 NW in Boulder's Columbia Cemetery.