Before we headed home from vacation…

…we made one more day of it, touring the Fredericksburg Battlefield before hitting the road south.  Fredericksburg is where my great-great-great (possibly one more great – I can never remember) grandfather lost his leg, so I was excited that we were staying close enough to visit there.  The visitor’s center was being remodeled, so we didn’t get nearly as much information about the battle itself as we normally would, but the lady in the gift shop did look up his name, James McDaniel, on her computer, and could tell me that he was a Corporal in the Calvary, Company C, Georgia State Guard.  And Lindee happened to think to ask if her mother-in-law Emma’s great-great-great grandfather fought there.  They knew he’d been killed at Petersburg late in the war, but didn’t know much else about where he’d served.  And sure enough, there he was.  So Mallory & Clara had ancestors on both sides fighting together.  Pretty cool.  This picture is the Sunken Road that sort of bisected the battlefield, & was pretty much the base for the fighting.get-attachment

 

Often – well, most of the time, really – anywhere we stopped outside on vacation, Clara would get up close and personal with any bugs or gravel or grass or whatever she could find to entertain herself :-).  She was so so so so so good the entire week – just went along with whatever we wanted to do.get-attachment

 

As we were at Chancellorsville, we were very interested in the trenches that continued to stand the test of time – over 150 years now.  Fredericksburg was fought in December before Stonewall Jackson was killed the following spring, so these were actually trenches his men built.  It was just another great day, and an awesome way to end our vacation.get-attachment