Frequent visitors to this site have seen many changes since it first started sometime in 1996. It started as a one or two page history with a promise to be “the best” source of information on the 17th CVI on the web. A pretty big claim but one that I hope has been accurate. With the help of a small army of contributors I think the site has put a lot of information out there that would have otherwise stayed hidden in dusty books and forgotten files. Thanks to more people than I can name the faces of many of these soldiers are once more visible to all of us.
With time (and with demands on my time) the site has grown a little more stale and a lot more stagnant that I would have hoped. With the 150th anniversary of the regiment approaching I am working to change that. Thanks to some pretty amazing improvements in technology (enabling those people like me who have a little bit of knowledge to make it seem like we have more!) I think the site will be better than eve and more accessible to more people. The addition of a blog will provide a better or more effective means of communicating information than the old guestbook(s) did…and hopefully reduce the number of spam ads for, well, things that have no place on a history site.
Hopefully the blog addition will give me a quicker way to add new material and even bring out some old gems that have been lost in some hyperlink limbo for many years. For those folks who have sent me a lot of new material that has yet to make it on the site it should do the same – publish it here and then add it to the site.
I’m not sure how it will all come out as this is a new format for me to work with, but so far as I work to transfer pages to the new site it will be a pleasant change for everyone. The www.17thcvi.org pointer should bring everyone here that wants to be here, and in time I think I will have the pages set up correctly. Since the demise of the old AT&T webpage service it has been an uphill road to get a decade-worth amount of information available once again.
So, whether a long-time visitor or someone who stumbled across this – welcome and stay tuned.
I am pleased to see the revamped and updated website. Thank you for your hard work over the years.
We’ve corresponded over the years regarding my gr.gr. grandfather John Augustus Lowden, pvt., Conn. 17th, Company I.
I’ve taken a look at the wounded/captured/killed list for the Battle of Gettysburg that you have here. On his service record papers, it is listed that he was paroled August (if my memory serves me correctly) from Alexandria, Virginia.
Since there were so many soldiers captured that day from the 17th, I wonder if you might know more about the circumstances of their parole.
Hi Bridget, welcome back! Hopefully the entire site will be back online in the new format soon. J. Montgomery Bailey (Company C) wrote about his capture, captivity and subsequent parole in his writings for the Danbury newspaper – I don’t know that I’ve transcribed it yet so this weekend I will look it up and take a shot at getting it done and posted!