Yet, to keep track of what’s going on, I did find an interesting blog that focuses specifically on the ship. As of today, the latest post on “goings-on” was made on April 4 and it focuses on the Dahlgren gun site bar. For those who follow the underwritten naval side of the Civil War, this looks like a good place to follow active preservation work in that area.

“The lead article in the Style newspaper section of The Washington Post features “At Last, a Gettysburg Redress“. Yes, the play on headline words is clever but the article, itself, is well researched and well written. All the whys and wherefores of this new center are all encased.

Remembrance Day is always memorable and special to the Sons Of Union Veterans. Now you have an additional reason to put it on your calendar as a place to visit, give a speech, march in the parade…and seek out the new visitor’s center.”

If you are flying and live near an airport served by Southwest, considering flying into Manchester, New Hampshire on Southwest instead of Logan Airport in Boston. Word has it from someone who has friends who fly into the Peabody regularly area for business, that they say Manchester is far better than Logan. You are probably going to need to rent a car, no matter where you fly into, so that topic is the same. The distance from either airport is about the same, so again, the issue is a wash. But as far as convenience and ease of use, everyone is saying that, if flying to attend the National Encampment, go to Manchester. It’s a much smaller airport, has more convenient passenger services (baggage claim, car rental counter, etc.) and is MUCH better to get in and out of. Logan is renowned for its difficulty getting to and from the airport.

If you have a chance to view this with either the Mozilla Firefox browser or the Internet Explorer browser, go with the Firefox option. The aesthetic features of the site prove to be far better with Firefox. Firefox 2 is free to download and use.

Some of the accomplishments of the Friends have been the installation of interpretive markers at Gathland State Park telling of the life of Civil War correspondent George Alfred Townsend, additional interpretive markers describing the Battle of South Mountain, printing of interpretive materials and the acquisition of several important artifacts.

The most recent acquisition was the pistol carried by Sgt. Charles Goodwin during the battle. Sgt. Goodwin was a courier assigned to deliver a message to Maj. Gen. Jesse Reno toward the end of the Sept. 14, 1862 battle. Sgt. Goodwin was with Maj. Gen. Reno when the general was mortally wounded on the field.
Sgt. Goodwin grabbed the reins of the general’s horse and led it off the field so the Confederates wouldn’t capture the general. Reno would die later that evening from his wounds.

The full article is at:
http://www.herald- mail.com/ ?cmd=displaystor y&story_id= 190756&format= html

Those annoyingly long and large words in the bottom corner of the sidebar on the right are part of a “tag cloud.” Each time I write a new post, I include “tags” that are relevant to the material within the post. You can see a list of tags for a particular post just under the header for the post. In turn, when I create these tags, they impact the “tag cloud” in the sidebar. The more I write about a particular subject that has been covered in a tag within the post, the larger the corresponding word gets in the tag cloud. In time, these can get rather large and even slip off into the dark edges of the blog where one can’t read the full tag. This can be a particularly annoying feature for those of us who deal with print publications layout – it just looks like sloppy formatting, but it’s really just a feature particular to blogging. Ironically, I learned the basics of blogging through the same graduate program that is training me to be a stickler when it comes to editing and publications layout. Nevertheless, this tag cloud serves as a tool for navigation through posts. When you select a hyperlink in the tag cloud, it will take you to all posts that have that particular tag. While I use a tag cloud, I opted not to include a category cloud – the two together in a blog can really get confusing.

Hope this helps. If there are any other questions, please feel free to ask.

He has launched a new blogsite at www.amonumentaltask.blogspot.com so people can learn more and learn where to send donations. He is hoping to have all the money raised and the sword physically replaced in two years.

The website includes an official Press Release that all are welcome to use when talking about the project with interested groups or media.

I also want to encourage those within the department, who haven’t sent in ancestral information, to do so. The matrix is large, but not quite large enough (all of the brothers in the department are not yet represented), and I’d love to see it grow to cause a reader to do a good bit of scrolling to read through it all.