The Real McCoy
When you’re working with Civil War pension files at the National Archives, you never really know what you’re going to get. A soldier’s file could be a few pages or a few hundred. It could include a simple rejection or repeated special investigations. If you’re lucky, it might include something like a photograph or an original marriage certificate. I’ve looked at a lot of pension files over the years and know to expect the unexpected, but nothing could have prepared me for Lewis McCoy. As this photo shows, it was a monster.
Fonetic Speliŋ
I’ve written quite a bit already about my Longley relatives, including Thomas, who spoke out against slavery in Kentucky in 1805, and Abner, who joined a utopian socialist community in 1844. I joke sometimes that this branch of my family never met a radical idea they didn’t want to try out, and there’s actually some truth to that. Abner’s sons continued this pattern, becoming journalists, printers, flag and playing card manufacturers, utopian socialists, and in the case of his oldest son Elias Longley, a passionate advocate for phonetic spelling. It is Elias and his wife Margaret Vater Longley about whom I am writing today and in my next post.
A Well-Known Furniture Manufacturer
My mother owned quite a few antiques although she wasn’t really a collector. She only occasionally purchased antiques herself, but she had many objects that she had inherited from family members. When she passed away last year, I went through these items and consigned most of them to an antique store. I ended up keeping one chair, however, after my cats adopted it as their own. As it turns out, those cats have impressively good taste in antique furniture.
When Uncle Sam Was Ready, Things Moved Fast
My great-grandfather, Francis Fielding (Frank) Longley, was a civil engineer who specialized in water treatment systems. Clean and readily available water is one of those things that it’s easy to take for granted, and learning about his work has really opened my eyes to what it takes to provide water to those who need it. He had a long and varied career and wrote a number of interesting accounts of his experiences, but this blog post will focus on only his work with the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) during World War I.