I’m off bouncing between the National Park Service archives and Old Town Fredericksburg churches all week.

So far I’ve gone through 44 bound volumes at the NPS resulting in at least 50 items of interest and I have received mounds of rare and unpublished materials for 8 of the 12 churches. (That’s me going a pile of vols. at the NPS while pretending that it is work and not play. You can't see that I'm in 'heaven on earth' and smiling ear to ear.) I now have books, brochures, and file - after file - after file of letters, memoirs, official records, and newspaper accounts. Special thanks to Chief Historian John Hennessy and his staff for an outstanding day of study, and to my wonderful daughter Madison who kept the Xerox machine humming. I also took a dozen or so photos of Chatham’s magnificent grounds on our lunch break. I'll be adding a fav to my photo album next week.

This afternoon, I met with Mark Olson who is from the Archives Committee at Shiloh Baptist (Old Site). Mark generously provided me with some stunning material. I bet you didn’t know that prior to the war years the original Fredericksburg Baptist Church was completely integrated, and that the white citizens only dismissed the African-American members of their congregation after the start of the war. I now have copies of the official rolls and transcripts on the white-black split that resulted in Shiloh. There's much more to this story and material like this is going to make my book stand out. I'll be meeting with a rep from Fredericksburg Baptist on Thursday to get 'the other side' of this story. Tomorrow I’ll also be stopping at Salem Church in the afternoon, and we may pop into Fredericksburg's Confederate Cemetery to track down some graves.

I am learning so much already, and to ‘spend a day at the office’ at a magnificent place like Chatham Manor is almost too much for me to handle. I’ll be back there tomorrow going through ‘loose’ files (courtesy of Eric Mink) that are not part of the NPS's bound collection. I can’t wait to see what revelations are revealed. Now that I’m nearing the mid-way point in the research cycle, I’m realizing that the biggest challenge will be in deciding what to use and what not to use. The History Press has a pre-determined word-count in my contract as there is also a large quantity of photos. That means that I have to use the best stuff to make this book worthwhile for the reader. I have plenty to choose from – maybe too much.