Thanks for apologizing and I am sure that the late Richard Rollins would appreciate that as well. He was a PhD in history by the way and knew from his training very well how to conduct research. This takes in far more than just books. This encompasses thousands of manuscript collections, diaries, post-war accounts, period and post-war newspapers - tons of stuff as I have learned from him years ago. This is why books take ten years to complete and still many authors miss things either through lack of time and resources or from collections that they did not know about. Researchers like Ken Legendre and I have spent hundreds of hours in state archives, local archives, museum files, university libraries - loads of places to do our flags research. Ken has more years into this than I do and he will tell you that the surface has been scratched only and that there's much more work to do. Tom Martin has done a lot of similar research over the many years including attending scholarly conferences on flags, which is where I met him some years ago. All of the scholars on these message boards have done thousands upon thousands of hours of serious research in many places before they publish anything.

A perusal of the Rollins Gettysburg flags book will show you in the footnotes and bibliography that he too spent hundreds of hours in many such places for the research for this book. This is why the first thing I do when I get any new book is go right to the bibliography as that tells you how much work went into the project. Things have come out since his passing but it was not from lack of trying that he did not locate them while doing the book. As I learned years ago, that comes with the turf; you will always miss something. But that does not mean that you don't try.

Greg Biggs