On Comments

      Guys, you have made comments on "Prescriptive History" that are interesting water-cooler talk, but they're also unattested and more than a little dubious.  "I heard" and "I suspect" are jumping-off points, not landing points: they are where research should begin, not where speculation starts to wander.

     Local Civil War history is often not difficult to track down -- find your local Historical Society or its analog; they often have extensive libraries, which may even contain otherwise unpublished material.  Likewise, many churches retain extensive historical material, and you can directly find out the source of the "Second," Third," "New," "Reformed," etc. offshoots.  Newspaper "morgues" -- back issues -- are increasingly online, and many are free to browse.  There's no need to guess or muse, and I have decided not to publish your recent comments, interesting though they were: we can all do that kind of speculation on our own, each about as well as anyone else.  On the other hand, only the person near the source material can go look up the facts and report back.

     I realize that this may appear harsh, arbitrary or stuck-up, and I'm sorry about that.  But the answer to guesswork is not more guesswork.  It's facts.

     Someone's going to object that I write off the cuff a lot in this blog.  It's true; I do.  And you're welcome to refute me, in detail and with credible supporting information.  This is, however, my blog.  I get to natter on from time to time, just like any other fool can do with their own blog.