New adventures

Tuesday, April 22

Hillary and I have a new task here at the park and we are delighted to be "on it."  As you might expect Stones River National Park has a storeroom full of archives, from old photos to muster papers, from cemetery ledgers to received letters, and many of these are fragile original documents!  We have been blessed with the task of digitalizing these documents.  What that means is that we are taking digital photographs of each and every piece.  Hillary dons her white gloves; I crawl up on the ladder to ensure the camera is focusing, completely grasping the entire piece, and snapping the photos.  We should only have a picture of this.

The first project we took on was a 1902 booklet of Confederate soldiers, one photo of most with a two or three sentence description on each of the 88 pages.  We were very surprised to read that the 40-year-old in the photo had joined up as a 13-year-old.  I knew there were youngsters sneaking into the ranks, but 13???  The book was not complete, but we gently turned the pages and shot every single one.  The photos are now on Jim's computer for filing and cataloging in the documents file.

The next project was the cemetery ledger from the Columbia, TN, Cemetery which was in existence for only a couple years because of local resistance to a national union cemetery.  Entries from 1867 and on.  Gentle is the order of this task, and Jim gave us a thumbs-up to take time now and again and read the entries.  It is a humbling experience to be working with these documents.  Once the cemetery books are finished, we have boxes full of "letters received" and "letters sent" from and to inquiries about persons believed to have been buried in the Columbia National Cemetery.

On another note, Saturday we are joining a Civil Rights trip group from Edina Community Lutheran Church in Birmingham, AL.  We will meet with individuals active in the civil rights movement in the l960s, worship at the 16th Street Baptist Church, and visit a park in Birmingham that memorializes the movement in downtown Birmingham.    A future post will no doubt appear about this upcoming adventure.