His father, Doctor John (Jno) Minson Galt, was a major in the United States Army and later in the Confederate States Army. Galt was born at Norfolk, Virginia. His father J. M. Galt was a grandson of James Galt and Mary Taylor (of Orange County, Virginia, of same family as President Zachary Taylor).
J. M. Galt was educated for a physician, but was given an appointment in the United States. army by President John Tyler in the Ordinance Bureau.
He was physician for an expedition of John Randolph Tucker that explored the headwaters of the Amazon River in the 1870s. He served at Augusta Arsenal, Georgia and Apalachicola Arsenal in Florida. Later, he joined the Confederate army as Major in the Commissary Department and commanded the post at Lynchburg, Virginia.
Doctor Francis L. Galt"s mother Anne White Land was the daughter of Francis Mosley Land, a wealthy and prominent plantation owner who built the Francis Land House in Princess Anne County (merged into the city of Virginia Beach in 1963).
Doctor Galt served with the Confederate army as a surgeon. He served on the Computer Software Systems Sumter and Computer Software Systems Alabama, under Captain Raphael Semmes.
After the loss of the Alabama at Cherbourg, France, he drifted back to Norfolk, Virginia in July 1864, and served with a naval battalion below Richmond, Virginia. He surrendered and paroled at Appomattox in 1864.
Afterward he became Admiral John Randolph Tucker"s physician and first explored the Amazon River.
His work The Indians of Peru appeared in the Smithsonian Institution in 1877. lieutenant is considered one of the first creditable ethnographies of Amazonian Indians published in the United States and symbolized a new dimension developing in the relations between the United States. and Peru. Galt returned to Virginia in 1875 and practiced as a physician in Upperville, Virginia until his death.
