My fresh perspective is as old as the war itself.  At first, such a statement might sound contradictory.  However, it’s not when you realize that people have walked these fields in remembrance for over 160 years. Rather than focus on a detached textbook approach to the entire battle, Shiloh - "Cry Havoc!"  is to me more than a walking tour, it's more than an academic review of the battle, like so many I grew up with, its family history, my family history.

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Beginning on the slopes opposite Fraley’s Field, our tour follows the movements of Major Aaron B. Hardcastle’s 3rd Mississippi Battalion throughout the entire battle on April 6, 1862.  If ever there was a Forlorn Hope among men of war, truly Hardcastle’s battalion was certainly such a formation.  They were the “tip of the spear” as they waited and watched in the pre-dawn hours of a chilly wet Sunday morning. Bracing for the approaching day and whatever the lightening steel gray sky would reveal before them, these young men from Mississippi peered out across the dimly lit field with an anxiousness that only warriors stretched across a thousand years and a thousand of battles can relate too.  One of those young men waiting and watching in the darkness was eighteen year old John Henry Coker, my grandfather, my second great grandfather to be precise.  Within the same unit stood John Henry’s childhood companion Albert, my third great uncle.  Whatever the reasons that brought them to this point in their lives, in these still dark pre-dawn hours before the storm, they stood on the edge of history.

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That history was family history to me and my siblings growing up.  Stories of John Henry’s wartime experience, the battles he fought in, the hardships endured, all carefully preserved in oral history from generation to generation.  As I came of age, as a young adult, I began collecting a paper trail that led back to those turbulent years of the 1860’s that would give substance to the tales I had heard all my life.

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Those early efforts as an “amateur genealogists” ultimately led here.  What began as a sincere desire to preserve and share my knowledge of family history with other members of my family, both immediate and extended, has now matured into a regular expedition to, what to me is and always has been, sacred ground. And not only to myself and family, but to my childhood friends as well who also share a common bond as their grandfathers marched off to war, our greatest war, alongside mine.