When I spoke about the "romanticized versions" of the Civil War, I wasn't making a political statement, please don't misinterpret. I thought this was a genealogy forum.

I was referring to the fact that many of us are researching the same families, and often people assign motives to our ancestors' behaviors, i.e. why they fought on the Confederate side, or Union side, or why they "deserted", or went out of their way not to fight at all. I was just reminding everyone that we have no idea what the reality was back then. To one person, deserting is a sign of cowardice, to another person, desertion means that the soldier had a family to feed. And sometimes those who view "desertion" as cowardice and then minimize the entire record of an ancestor's life might miss the point that the ancestor did, indeed, make some heroic and very brave decisions. We don't really know why our ancestors did some of the things they did, but I'm guessing they made the best decisions they could make at the time they made them.