This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Classification: Query Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/rw/ncB.2ACE/1454.3.1.1.1 Message Board Post: I couldn't agree with you more regarding the Gen. William Stokes book. It reads so familiarly to me, the names of people like old friends. Mr. Halliburton should indeed have familiarized himself with the familial patterns of the Stokes' relatives and Colleton in general before writing the book. He may have had a much greater understanding of what he read in those letters home. And could possibly have helped the uninformed reader better understand the very personal nature of Gen. Stokes military duty, relationship to his soldiers, and the personal losses and grief when he had to write to his wife of yet another death from their very tightly knit community. I was so tempted to continue typing when I transcribed those few pages. The names on the page prior to the information on Junius Risher's death were plucked right from the Colleton census. I saw deaths of young men from the area, not simply soldiers to Gen. Stokes, but friends and relatives. People who lived within a few farms of his own. Their loss and afflictions were to Wm Stokes what Mr. Halliburton's book fails to portray in his indifference to those names found within the letters. They were personal. We find Sheridan, Smoak (Smoke), Fontaine, Spell, Williams, Risher, Liston, Jacques, Hill, Hiers, Guess, Glover, Carter, Canady, Campbell, Byrd, Appleby and so many more occupying his letters to his wife back home. These were not strangers to him. These were family members, past present and future. His blood and his ties to all that were familiar and comforting. The book is wonderful, but much more so when read with the eyes of one familiar to William Stokes' world. -Bev