I would like to thank everyone for their encouragement, prompting me to write this book. It has provided me an avenue to document some of the episodes of a number of ancestors, whose lives had a tremendous impact on those living around them at the time. The courage, wisdom, and resilence of these individuals living over 100 years ago are virtues we can admire and adopt as part of our lives today.

While I learned many facts about these individuals over the past 35 years, not until I started writing this book did I begin to appreciate the heritage that they represent. The heritage includes both family and the Southern way of life. Facts of a single individual's life alone (dates of birth, enlistment, imprisonment, death, etc,) does not reveal the character of that individual. It is the interaction of that individual with others that gives us a glimpse of who that person really was.