Memorial Day Approaches

I'm sitting here watching season 4 of Combat, the 1960's show that ran for five years featuring Vic Morrow and some other pretty decent actors. It's my library's fault: they had a display honoring Memorial Day, the Combat! DVDs were on it, and I had to do it. It's much better than I remember, and believe me, I used to be parked in front of the TV every Tuesday nights at 7:30, channel set on number 7 for WXYZ, Detroit's ABC affiliate.

Be that as it may, what Memorial Day truly inspires in me is a remembrance of the Civil War, and what that meant to us as a nation. Decoration Day, as it was once called, was intended to honor our Civil War soldiers. Later it was expanded to include veterans of all wars.

I remember 1961 and the centennial celebration of the Civil War vividly. About 10 years later, I learned that my grandfather's grandfather (2nd great) had fought in the war, but very little was known about that. So 20 years after that, when our youngest son Derek was doing a project for school, we decided to find out about our Civil War ancestor.

This is a lengthy topic, so it will cover several posts. I plan to share the main points of Bertram Hawthorne Groene's Tracing Your Civil War Ancestor. If you really want to do this, buy this book! I've kept up on the Civil War genealogy books, and in my opinion, this is still the best one. Get the others from the library and learn from them. This is a pre-Internet book, but it is rock solid in its methodology and advice. We used this book to track down our ancestor, and as we walk through it we'll use our adventure as a guide.

Good hunting!