Kentucky Rebel Town, a new book by William A. Penn

YOU NEED TO ADD THIS TO YOUR LIBRARY

If you somehow missed the news, William A. (aka Bill) Penn, editor of the Harrison Heritage News, with a little help from the University of Kentucky Press, has published a fine history of Civil War times in Harrison County.  It is entitled Kentucky Rebel Town - The Civil War Battles of Cynthiana & Harrison County.

One might call it a revision of the author's earlier Civil War history, Rattling Spurs and Broad-Brimmed Hats: The Civil War and Harrison County, Kentucky (Battle Grove Press, 1995).  Yet, it really is a body of work that stands on its own when one considers how much more work has been done in recovering the details of lost history using research techniques and records not readily available in what might be considered the pre-internet era of the 1980s and '90s.

The volume should fill all your desires to know what is knowable about Cynthiana and Harrison County in the 1850s, '60s, and postbellum era..  There are 278 pages of great reading for the history buff with about an additional hundred pages of citations, including the index. Copies are available directly from Bill (who is also proprietor of the Midway Museum Store in Midway, Ky.), from the University of Kentucky Press, and if you are in or can make it to Cynthiana, they have been offered recently at the Cynthiana-Harrison County Museum for $47.70, of which $10 will be donated to the museum.

Bill's book should be of interest to genealogists as well. Did you know the difference between how a regular person reads a book and how a genealogist reads a book?  Your average bookworm will start at page one, while the genealogist will go to the back of the book first ... not to find out how the story ends, but to see if his relations ever got listed in the index before even bothering to read the text!

So, for a genealogist, quite a few books end up being pretty short reads, but Kentucky Rebel Town has just over twenty pages of index, with lots of names for genealogists to search for.

Rebel General John Hunt Morgan thought that Cynthiana was worth coming back to for a second "visit," and, luckily for us, Bill came back, too, to put his pen to work in giving old history a new look.

Philip