Honeybee wrote:I do hope to make the drive to Gettysburg sometime this year. I've got a great, great, great, great Uncle whose on the memorial somewhere, on the Union Side fighting with a New Hampshire regiment.
Way cool, Honeybee. If you get to go, have the name of your relative, the name/number of the regiment he was in or whatever you know about the part of the battle he was in. The Park Service has used GIS extensively at the National Battlefield Parks to help people easily find monuments of interest. I've not been to Gettysburg, but I did a paper for a GIS class I took on how GIS was used at the Chicamauga/Chattanooga National Battlefield which is probably one of the largest outdoor sculpture gardens in the world due to all the monuments. Although it might be expensive, it could be worthwhile to hire a licensed battlefield guide for a tour. They have to sit an incredibly difficult exam to get that license and there is only a limited number of them, but they could get you right to the part of the battlefield that is of particular interest to you and probably tell you more than you would ever want to know about it. There's another job I would have loved if I had known about it years ago. I'm kind of out of luck being stuck here in Illinois, although there were large POW camps at Camp Douglas in Chicago (around 31st and King Drive) and at Rock Island (at the Arsenal).