In remembrance of things past...

As today is Memorial Day, I thought it only appropriate to share this. It is a wonderful little find from last week.

In preparation for my trip to SLC this coming Saturday - yes, it is coming up fast - I was going over my game plan to make sure I was properly prepared. One of the surnames I will be researching this time is SMITH, this SMITH line will be Susanna Smith Shepard's. I know her parents names and most of her siblings. One of her brothers was a gentleman named Kinzey Smith. Because of the more unique nature of the name I was checking to see if I could find anything online about him.

One of the hits in my search was FindAGrave, an excellent resource. There was a Kinsman "Kinzey" Smith listed, whose date of birth matched what I had in my records. So when I clicked on the link, up popped his entry, which included a picture of two men.

Here's the kicker.

One of the men in the picture, looked exactly like one of the Shepard pictures I had scanned a few years ago and uploaded to Flickr. Not similar, exactly. So a read of the caption told me that this was a picture of brothers Charles and Kinzey Smith, both veterans of the Civil War. Charles had fought for the Union side, Kinzey joined the Confederates.

One can only image the family conversations on that subject. I haven't done any research on either man yet. But in honor of their service I present them to you.

Charles is on the left and Kinzey is on the right. You will notice Kinzey has a hand missing, the result of a Fourth of July celebration gone wrong. You know what they say about playing with fire-crackers.

Here is the image that our family has had passed down to us:

I had thought that maybe this was Hartley Shepard, but now I know different.

And now I have pictures of three of the Smith family. Here's Susanna my ggg grandmother:

This was pulled off the Deem Family website. It is an extremely bad copy, but the best I can do.

Have an excellent Memorial Day. We plan on ribs and great weather.