Having multiple Kitchen and Kitchens in southeast MO didn't help either, and I still get them mixed up from time to time.

You mentioned Confederate Colonel Solomon George KITCHEN of Stoddard County who was a troop commander, but there was also Andrew Jackson "Dick" KITCHENS of south-central Missouri just a few miles to the west who was a guerrilla leader. I don't feel so bad, because I see in the "Official Records" that the Yanks confused these two all the time. It's another one of those Major Bowles versus Dick Boze cases.

Ah, the joys of working in Civil War topics of southeast Missouri!:
--hardly any period newspaper coverage,
--both sides doing stuff to each other and the residents that they wouldn't admit to in print,
--scarcity of Confederate records from the region,
--Union army records that left out lots of stuff and misrepresented a lot of what they did print,
--few surviving letters and diaries,
--county histories that don't have dates and few sources for the old oral Civil War stories,

....but a helpful army of local researchers and writers to help us through it all. I seem to remember a few years ago somebody saying "Reality is for people who can't deal with fantasy," or did I get that wrong?

Bruce