Conducting research on all of my family, I am very very disappointed in the job primary schools and colleges have done to educate the people about that terrible war. What I have learned about my family says the history books are rife with errors and misinformation about the people who are now gone and can't make corrections.

It's hypocritical, and arrogant, for the living to cast judgement on the dead. As a young child, I had the great fortune to know many very old people in rural Alabama and Tennessee, some of whom were losing their minds and taking leaps back to their childhood and young adulthood, and they'd verbalize what they had witnessed as if it were happening in front of us. I was, frankly, too young and naive to appreciate their messages at the time, but I distinctly remember some of them. And what I'd do sit down with them again, or with those ancestors who lived through that war and "reconstruction".

Right now I'm at 68 paternal ancestors who witnessed or participated in that war, and each of their stories are precious. Thanks to all of you for making the effort to keep those stories alive. I hope everybody, including the hypocrits who want to revise history by vandalizing graves, live to appreciate it all.