flickr is a many splendored thing

The internet never ceases to amaze me. There is so much helpful information out there, if you do a little digging. And sometimes you don't have to dig at all - the information comes to you.

I have been uploading old family photos to flickr and tagging them or labeling them with what little I know or can remember being told by my grandmother, who died over fifteen years ago. One of our family stories is about a young man from Wisconsin, who was a drummer boy in the Civil War. I posted photos from a Civil War-era photo album to the site and one of the unlabeled photos was immediately selected for a flickr group, where two members, Civil War buffs for sure, were able in a few days to help confirm the suspicion that this photo was indeed of my great-great grandfather, William Beverige Cassels, as the stick he is holding was identified as a special baton used in the music corps. Matched with genealogical information via ancestry, and I had his discharge information and confirmation that he was in the fife and drum corps. Cool.

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