My “Book-Like-Thingy” and a Shout Out

I’m still plugging away at what I have come to call my “book-like-thingy.”  While I realize that publication in traditional print format is barely a remote possibility (a: it’s a reference work, not a narrative; b: it’s First Bull Run related; c: the reaction from a publisher to whom I showed an early draft was deafening silence), I find working on it therapeutic and at the very least I’ll make the whole thing available free here, barring the aforementioned remote possibility.

I was working on the captain of the Wise Troop, Company B of the 30th Virginia Volunteers (later to become the 2nd Virginia Cavalry).  The little I could find on John S. Langhorne indicated some very interesting things regarding his descendants.  If you read this blog often, you know that this is the kind of stuff that really gets me going.  But such was the nature of the info that I needed to first confirm that this was the same John S. Langhorne – there were more than one.  Without giving too much away, my stumbling around in the darkness of the web led me to make a phone call to Rachel Deddens of the Lynchburg, Va. Museum System.  Ms. Deddens came through for me big-time, pointing me to a publication, Lynchburg in the Civil War, by George Morris and Susan Foutz (it’s starting to look like I’m going to need quite a few more H. E. Howard books), and faxing me some information from a site’s volunteer manual that I imagine is not readily available.

Thanks, Rachel, for all your help!