I have been fortunate this past year to speak at more than a dozen historical societies, Civil War interest groups, Lions Clubs, Rotary Clubs, etc. here in York County, Pennsylvania, as part of my book tour to promote sales of Flames Beyond Gettysburg: The Gordon Expedition, June 1863 (Columbus, Ohio: Ironclad Publishing, 2009). These engagements have all been fantastic experiences as I have had a chance to share some of what I have learned about my adopted county's Civil War history, meet and fellowship with some great people, and visit some places and locations I had not previous seen. Besides all of my new friends, my other pleasure from these events has been the willingness of audience members to bring or mail copies of old documents and photographs pertaining to the Civil War and to share their oral traditions and anecdotes handed down by their ancestors.
We are slowly losing the generation who physically knew and had contact with the eyewitnesses to the Civil War (my late father, for example, told me many wonderful Civil War stories passed down by his neighbors and relatives who fought in the war. He was born in 1914 and his life overlapped scores of elderly veterans that he knew as a youth). The same is true here in York County, which is why I treasure all those accounts people tell me of what their ancestors experienced when the Confederate army invaded this region in the summer of 1863.
I have captured many of these stories over the past year and will be sharing some of them throughout 2010 here on the Cannonball blog.
Here is the first batch, in no particular order:




