Work in progress

This blog will be a  work in progress for a while. My main focus will be on my "obsession" but I have quite a bit of material and potential material to post here once I do some more research and get it more organized.

What inspired this new blog was a trip I made to Evergreen Cemetery in Southgate, Ky last Saturday. I went looking for the headstone of a Dennis Boyle, a name I had found in a newspaper article from 1909. I did not find his marker, but in the same section and neighboring sections - none of them the Union soldiers' section of the cemetery- I found 20 more markers that I had not expected to find. Unfortunately, I did not have pen and  paper with me, but I did have my camera and I took pictures of each. Some of them, though, are virtually illegible. I do hope to go back with pen in hand and see if I can read them better in person than on digital photographs, but with winter soon to be here, I am not sure if I will do that this year.

My next step is to confirm the names and the units listed on the headstones. Hopefully the National Park Service's wonderful Soldiers and Sailors system (which has seemed to have quite a bit of technical difficulty in recent days) will help me. I will also use a local public library's newsdex index to find obituaries of as many of these  men as I can find.(Maybe I'll even find other stories about them besides reports of their deaths.)

It will be in these obituaries and stories where I hope to find interesting tales to share on this blog. I have a couple in mind from my previous research, but I'm hoping this latest batch of names, including Mr. Boyle, will lead me to even more fascinating "tales from beyond the grave."

This latest cemetery trip also convinces me there are many more such headstones to find it that large cemetery, beyond the six dozen or so in the Union Soldiers' plot. That means more trips and exploring, and hopefully I will be better prepared on future expeditions to the hills of that cemetery.

In the meantime, I will post  here when I can, but it may not be overly frequently.

I also will likely be experimenting with the look of this blog, as I try to find the right combination of colors, images and features to create an appropriate and attractive look