THE
It occurred to me the other day (March 26,
2001 specifically) as I was completing one of my many search-and-correct-spelllign-errors
missions, that this website has been through a heap of changes since December,
2000 when this site was begun.
What kinds of changes? Well, I
couldn’t quite remember them all because I hadn’t been keeping up with it,
because initially it didn’t seem too important.
However, as the site became better read by the general public, I
thought it might be nice to have a place for return visitors to see what has
been updated.
The changes completed after about
So, here are the site updates, in reverse
chronological order:
2003
August 2 Added some questions and answers about gear guns and shoes to our FAQ page. Hopefully this will help some of our prospective recruits. I also tried to update our members list.
July 16 Added picture from Huck's Defeat 2003
February 13 Added more pictures from Kettle Creek 2003 (I am not going to link this one. I figure you can use the one below. Just because I am lazy doesn't mean you can be). Updated current members list.
February 12 Added Pictures from Kettle Creek 2003
January 26 Add pictures from Kettle Creek 2002, Updated some information in Introduction page, Created Past Events Page, Updated links page, Updated Equipment Page
January 18
Added Info and Guidelines for Kettle Creek
2003
2002
February 13—Although my knees are still
stiff, I have just about recovered from our weekend at the commemoration of
the 223rd Anniversary of the Battle of Kettle Creek, outside of Washington,
Georgia. This was the Refugee’s
first time to visit the site in a big group, and we have a LOT of people to
thank. First, we were the guests
of the Samuel Elbert Chapter of the Georgia Society of the Sons of the
American Revolution, so to them we offer our sincere thanks.
Second, thanks to all of the spectators who stopped by the campfire to
chat—there were several hundred folks who made the trek back into the battle
site and we appreciate all of the kind comments.
Third, many thanks to our man (using the term loosely) Steve Brown who
coordinated with everyone involved and got us invited in the first place.
We are grateful for Steve’s continuing hard work and his willingness to
don long, flowing wigs and dance around the campfire.
Few militia companies have ever had such a willing fop.
Fourth, to all of our guys who made the trip—a few of you had to drive
a goodly piece, but the resulting assemblage of stinky fellows in odd clothing
certainly made it worthwhile.
Finally, a GIGANTIC THANK YOU to our favorite Tory, Mr. Charles LeCount of the
King’s Own Patriots for falling in with us.
Chuck’s knowledge and ongoing willingness to assist the Refugees has
been of enormous help to us. Chuck
willingly took on the unenviable task of drilling us, but by the end of the
day Saturday, there was not a single Refugee who did not know how to rest or
shoulder his firelock. So to Chuck
and all the other members of the KOP, “Hooty-hoo.”
In the coming days, we will post a full
after-action report with all the sordid details of what happens when you mix
men, fire, beans, cold, darkness, and a total lack of scruples.
We will also post all sorts of pictures (remarkably free of goat porn),
so please check in again soon.
January 29—Well a couple of changes, one of which you probably already notice if you have ever visited before, that being the above intro paragraph to the Site Update page has gotten markedly shorter. This is due to my decision to redact my former rather snippy references to webblogging. This has nothing to do with my recent change of heart about blogging. The fact that I now have my own blog (Powered by Blogger—Isn’t yours?) has absolutely nothing to do with it. Really.
The second is some very good genealogical information that has come our way from Harold Hopkins, a descendant of Lambeth Hopkins. It can be read over on the Biographical Information part of the site. The Refugees wish to express our great appreciation to Mr. Hopkins for helping us out!
The hit counter today is at 7908, and the site stats for 2001 look something like this:
1. From March to December, we had about 5040 hits (before March, there were about 800 more, but I didn’t add HitBox until March)
2. Most of the folks who followed a link to our site were referred by the Carl Vinson Institute of Government site administered by the University of Georgia. (As much as it goes against an Auburn grad to say it “Thank you, UGA!”)
3. 34.5% of you spent from 1 to 5 minutes wandering around, while a further 43.7% of you stayed 6 minutes or longer (including you odd .25% type folks who spent over an hour.)
4. 74% of you were first time visitors, while there was an insane little posse of you, 67 in number, who visited between 25 and 99 times over the year.
5. Our highest rated month was April, when we got 741 hits, and our lowest was March, with 303. Most months we average about 450 hits.
6. Our most requested search term was, aptly enough “georgia refugees” although we did have one hardy soul who found us by searching “pictures africa civil war and refugees.”
7.
As I have noted all through the year, we get visitors from around the
world, and many from our various branches of government.
To all of you, thank you for your continued support and good wishes.
2001
December 18—Revised the wording of the above introduction to this
page. (Yeah, I know, WOW!)
We have gotten back our initial comments from Norman Fuss of the BAR,
and I have much work to do to our submittal.
Lots and lots of work.
Nothing a large, gas-powered garden trimmer can’t handle, I hope.
I want to thank the folks from the Unaboard who came by and offered
some constructive criticism of the site: robgruver, Popup, sdimbert, and mattk.
They gave me some great tips which will one day be incorporated into
this site to make it easier to use.
I probably won’t fix anything else before the start of the new year, so
from me and all the other
December 4—A few minor corrections to various bits of code in some of the pages, and finally got around to fixing the graphic on the Tondee’s Tavern page. I also just figured out that all of the old hyperlinks to Tondee’s were never updated down in the entries below, so I have gone back through and fixed those, too. I continue to find not-quite-workable bits of artifacts of earlier iterations of this site, so if you see something that needs work, be sure to let me know. I have uploaded our BAR submittal document to the server, but due to its cumbersome size, huge imbedded tabular data, and Navigator-unfriendly formatting (thanks Microsoft!), its download quality is spotty and slow. I tried accessing it from home on a 54K modem with my Navigator browser, and got a whole load of crap after waiting about five minutes. BUT, it you are just ITCHING to read it, you can try it and see how well it works on your machine. It can be read (using great liberty with the definition of “read”) from this link. This will get fixed in time, also, just give me some time!
November 27—Well, it’s been a while since we talked,
now hasn’t it? Here in the
In other bits of housecleaning and general mayhem, I made a slight
edit to the Timeline in order to correct the entry for the
I have mentioned it several times in the past, but I just want to
say again that we appreciate all of our visitors, especially those of you who
live abroad and pay us a visit. I was looking at our stats for the past few
months and it is great to see all of the folks who have dropped in: UK (10);
Canada and Saudi Arabia (7 each); Australia, Denmark, Hong Kong, and Japan (4
each); New Zealand (3); Germany, Portugal, Singapore, and Spain (2 each); and
Finland, France, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Taiwan, all with 1
each. Whenever I see an international visitor, I try to work in a “thank you”
in your native language, but I seem to have missed a bunch of you.
So,
THANK YOU!
October 9—Whole page of new photos of
Old Salem added to the
Members section. Many thanks to everyone
up there in NC who took the Refugees under their wing and made us look almost
coordinated.
In other matters, we remind everyone that even though our hobby
deals with recreating the past, the events upon the 11th day of September,
2001 brought us very forcefully into the here and now.
Many of The
August 21—New
Pictures of King’s Mountain added to the
Members section.
We cannot thank our friends with the
King’s Own Patriots enough for the
good times they afforded us. Great
bunch of fellers, even though they tend to enjoy being Tories a bit much.
August 17—Added a link for the
RevWar75.com website, and managed
to not strangle my oldest child as she got ready for school.
“DAAAaaaad, jeans are too hot.”
Voice of Reason--But, your shorts don’t meet dress code.
“BUT. MY.
JEANS. ARE.
TOO. HOT!”
I felt like Dr. Strangelove when he couldn’t control his
hand—“MUST-VIGOROUSLY-APPLY-HAND-TO-BUTT!”
Managed to redirect hand to my head so I could pull out small clumps of
my hair. Ahhh, preteenagers—Can’t
live with ‘em, can’t eat ‘em.
August 14—So, Terry, why no updates for a
month? Sleepin’ on the job, eh?
NO! Just been doing other
things, such as clothing research for our BAR submission.
Hopefully, we have found a good primary source information about the
types of cloth and clothing available in Wilkes County at the start of the
war. In the book Quaker Records
in Georgia by Robert Scott Davis (Augusta Genealogical Society, Augusta,
1986, pp 196-254) there is the record of Captain William Manson who settled in
the Ceded Lands of Georgia in about 1773 with a group of 100 indentured
servants in a place near Wrightsborough that he named Friendsborough.
The book includes a recap of one of Manson’s ledger books for the year
1776 to 1777, and in it are contained many references to purchases by folks
for cloth and for the making of clothing, along with a huge amount of other
goods such as tools, food, dinnerware, and on and on.
Our intention is to do an analysis of this cloth data to help justify
our clothing requirements. I have
been working on this for several weeks now, and have gotten some interesting
things out of it. When I get
finished and get everything nicely formatted, I will put it here on the
website for everyone else to use.
As far as I know, this is the first sort of analysis done of this sort for the
backcountry of Georgia. Although I
do not intend for it to be as exhaustive as the Howard dissertation of
Virginia runaway clothing, hopefully it will be much more pertinent for who we
represent.
In other news, be sure and look for some of
the Refugees at King’s Mountain next weekend.
Yes, Georgians fought at King’s Mountain—about 30-50 or so under
Clarke. (‘Nother thing to look up
and post—guess I’ll do that in my ‘spare time.’)
And the hit counter is up to around 5180.
July 13—New photos of the group taken at
American Village on the 4th.
I will be adding some more to these in a few days after I get around to
opening the ones Charlie sent me via email.
Also made that new feller
Tod Jordan
a picture page linked off of the
Our Members page.
Various other pages have been updated to reflect the new picture
additions and all the furniture was given a light dusting and the rubbish
taken to the kerb. The Tondee
Tavern page in .htm still does not look the way I want it to—it would be so
nice if I used a webpage tool that gave me a better idea of what the final
product will look like for people using either Netcrap Navigator OR Internet
Destroyer. Yes, once again, I do
know such magical items exist. The
ol’ hit counter is now up to around 4670 or so, and a buenos dias y
gracias shout-out goes to our recent visitor from España.
July 12—After receiving a very nice email
with an offer to update the crappily done .doc files in the
Tondee’s Tavern section, I have
finally updated these insightful and useful bits of information into .htm
files that may actually be readable by people with Netscape.
Of course, my biggest problem here lately has been getting things to
upload to the Tripod server. I
can’t tell if it’s my machine, or Tripod, or both.
AND, stay tuned for updated pictures from the get together at American
Village on the 4th.
June 27—An ever-so-slight updating of the
Links page to add a site called
Warplay to the general reenacting
section. Also, remember, if you
are going to be in the central Alabama area for Independence Day, The Georgia
Refugees will be out at American Village in Montevallo for day long
demonstrations of cannon firing, drill, and humourous repartee.
You can get directions to Montevallo from the American Village website,
which is amply crosslinked to several pages on this site.
June 25—Added a photo of Tom Keen to the
Roster of current members.
A hearty Wilkommen, und
Grüß Gott to our recent site visitor from Germany.
Over the course of the last few months, we have also received several
hits from Honk Kong and Taiwan.
Since I am very leery of trying to post anything in Pinyin, (I have a hard
enough time with English) I will do the next best thing and just say “Hey
y’all!” which I think is pretty
much universal.
June 14—Added a new document to the
Historic Documents page—a
carpal-tunnel-syndrome-inducing retyping of the Georgia Militia Act of 1778.
Now I know that Governmentese is tedious, but this thing was apparently
intended to be an exercise in trying to construct the longest known sentence,
with the most number of subordinate clauses, which, as is known, must be
separated, as it were, with commas, or other such punctuation, such as
semi-colons, or dashes, or other such, as may be needed, to properly break, or
separate as aforesaid, the subordinate clause, from, and always from, the main
clause, excepting those cases in which the clause is further subordinate to
another subordinate clause. AND to
make Matters worse is the peculiarly unpredictable Pattern of capitalizing
words, Some of which, seemingly, are not made large when others of like Nature
take such capitalization.
AAAARRRGGHHHH!!!! If you can read
the Act for more than five minutes at a spell without going blind or hurting
someone, you are a better man than I!
But, it is pretty interesting if you get past the grammar, punctuation,
and spelling. Kind of like the
stuff on the rest of the site.
May 31—Hit counter over 4000.
Added a deposition given against John Cunningham for his conduct at the
July 22, 1777 Engagement at the Oconee River to the
Timeline, and excerpts from the
Elbert Order Book showing the outcome of Cunningham’s court martial.
(He was acquitted, by the way).
The
History page was also updated to
include this information, including correcting the date of the encounter.
May 25—Added a lengthy description to the
Timeline
of the May 21-23 Engagement at Ogeechee Road and
Ferry, aka Browne’s Defeat, aka Harris’s Bridge, from Todd Post of the 2d
Virginia
http://patriot.net/~tpost/2va.html.
May 16—Added a description to the
Timeline of the April 1781
Engagement at Wiggan’s Hill written by Kim Stacy of the 84th Regiment of Foot,
with further details provided by Patrick J. O’Kelley.
May 14—Added a description from Patrick J.
O’Kelley about the May 12-13, 1776 Engagement at Cockspur Island to the
Timeline.
And a special birthday wish to my scrawny little buddy, my son
Jonathan, who was born seven years ago today!
April 24—Added a new link to the
Historical Documents page to
The American Colonists’ Library.
April 20—Well, I just couldn’t stand it.
Ten whole days without an update was about to kill me.
So, we now have more names added to the
Original Members listing, taken
from the Wilkes County GenWeb site listing of those who fought at Kettle
Creek. Arigato to our
visitor the other day from Japan, and continued thanks to all who view out
site. Be sure and sign our
guestbook!
April 10—Several more new
Toulouse photos and a new page for
Ruth McCulloh.
April 9—Hit counter past 3,000.
Posted new photos for
Fort
Toulouse, and a picture page of
Chuck
Blake. You know,
speaking of our little get-together at Toulouse, dropping 35 pounds and
walking about 16 blocks every day was probably a good idea for me, given that
rolling a cannon around is darned tiring.
Had a visitor from Finland this morning.
Tervehdys! Kiitos!
And all them other Finnish words to say thanks for dropping by.
April 6—Added a new page for all of our
links and copies of
Historical
Documents, which got to be too big to go in the Table of
Contents. AND, someone signed our
guestbook! Get ready for some new
stuff next week after we get though at Fort Toulouse this weekend.
April 2—Added a link to
Americanrevolution.org to
Links page.
Still waiting for someone besides me to sign our DREAMBOOK.
[Note to self: Gee, what if
no one shows up for my slumber party?]
March 29—Added a
guestbook link down on the
Homepage.
[Note to self: Good grief,
when will I quit adding all of the latest fads from 1996?
NEXT BIG THING: Dancing
Baby .gif !] I really wanted a
guestbook from Tripod, but their database is down and so I settled for the
Dreambooks! book. I really
hate that name. Sounds like
something a 10 year old girl would have, right next to her Barbie CD burner
and Hello Kitty scanner. I am
really enamored of the HitBox statistical set; interestingly, the Refugees are
now international, thanks to a visitor from Taiwan.
These stats do not list anyone’s name or specific location, only top
domains, so don’t freak out. Many
thanks to all of our .mil, .gov, .edu, and .arpa users for stopping in.
March 27—Screams of horror when I got home
last night and viewed this here page with Netscape—parts of the text WAY off
to the right, lines jumbled together on top of each other, generally crappy
looking. Upload a hopefully
corrected copy to the server.
[Note to self: Just give up trying
to figure out this stuff.] Very
minor editing on the
Equipment List dealing with the
clothing and hair parts. (Parted
hair, hehehe). Added a link to
this page in the Table of Contents frame, way down at the bottom.
Converted the document explaining the Latin motto found on the home
page from a .doc file to htm.
March 26—Hit counter at 2,700.
Updated the
Timeline to give credit to Patrick
O’Kelley for his good information gleaned from his postings on the RevList and
to kinda reword the intro to better describe the contents.
Made some minor notations on the
Current Projects
page to say that the limber is finished (yea!) and that the scanning of the
Militia Act and Elbert’s Order Book continues at a glacial pace.
Slight polish of the
Georgia Maps page to take out the
swirly curlycues on the title and give the page a background color.
[Note to self: No more
curlycues!] Added this wonderful
page of blog as a link off of the
Introductory Information
page.
March 23—One of the things I really missed
(okay, the only thing) about our old GeoCities site was that it had a pretty
good set of site traffic log statistics, so I took the long overdue step of
adding the HitBox on the main page.
I don’t really care too much for knowing what’s happening on all the
pages, so I just kept it on the main page.
Lots of interesting data, NONE OF WHICH GETS SHARED OR PASSED ALONG TO
ANYONE, so please don’t shy away!
I’m just using it to track numbers of visitors and time spent and such,
(and to download all your credit information.)
Set up a NEW
FAQ page with all sorts of
irrelevant stuff.
March 22—New page for
“The
Wilkes County Militiaman’s Manifesto,” ripped off from “The
Authentic Campaigner’s Manifesto” with the kind permission of Colonel Nicky
Hughes.
March 21—Update to the
Favorite Links page to add the RevWar Campaigner site.
The next two items briefly step out of the
boring reverse chronological order, just because it makes a better read that
way:
March 19—I come in Monday morning and
receive the rude awakening that our website has been removed from Tripod due
to violation of the terms of service.
Also, no files on the file server.
Break out into cold sweat.
Write plaintive email to Tripod.
Find out that another unit, the 4th Company, Brigade of Guards, has also been
removed. Obviously, it’s some sort
of dark, anti-reenactor conspiracy aimed at silencing the voices of reason and
freedom! Or something.
March 20—Tripod responds that they goofed,
and there is no vast left-wing conspiracy.
Site is back up and running as well as can be expected.
Continue to receive at least two more responses that they goofed up and
were really sorry, and that there was no vast left-wing conspiracy.
And no Illuminati, either.
Nope, not the Trilateral Commission, either.
“Ignore the fellows outside your window, they’re just the building
cleaners.” Pssssshyeah, right!
I know when a vast conspiracy when I see one!
Those orgone generators don’t mean anything, I’m so sure!
[Note to self: Must stop
reading everything on the Internet, except for the Annika Sorenstam Worship
Page.]
We now return you to the boring reverse
chronological order.
March 13—Updated the
Schedule of Events page to correct the date for
March 12—Added more names to the
Original Members page and cleared up some of the information
already on there.
February 27 (or so)—Mark receives our
notification that we have been granted Applicant Member status with the BAR,
and our unit number is 310.
February 22—Updated
Our
Members to give Linda Jo and Al their own pages.
Added new
Original Members page with
biographical information about
February 21—Updated
Favorite Links with one for
the Historical Society of the Georgia National Guard and one for “This
Day in Georgia History.”
February 12—Updated
Timeline with a couple of engagements from Patrick
O’Kelley’s list posted to the RevList.
February 6—Added article to
Tondee’s Tavern called
The
Newby File, and added an Easter egg-ish link at the bottom
to the script for the Monty PythonÔ
skit of the Spanish InquisitionÒ,
simply because no one expects the Spanish InquisitionÒ.
February 5—Make pass through entire site
correcting John Dooly’s name.
February 2—Added the
Schedule of Events (finally).
February 1—Added the new
Unit
History page written by Steve Brown (with a light edit by
me). Hit counter makes the 1,000
mark. Approximately 843 of these
hits are me trying to make sure the pages are working right.
January 31—Updated the
Favorite Links page to rearrange it into a few categories,
and added four links to sites
dealing with
January 30—BIG revision to the whole site
to aid navigation and make the whole site less confusing:
1.
New title page with photo and unit designation.
Clicking on photo will take you to a page of introductory information.
Added Google search engine and new FastCounter at bottom of page.
2.
New introductory page leading to single pages for contacts, faqs, etc,
etc. Individual pages mostly still
under construction.
3.
New member page with roster of men and women present at Saturday’s
shindig, along with photos from the event.
New photos are links with no text, just the picture.
The original photos and text we had are still there, but I will be
updating all pages eventually so that they load quickly (no more .doc files).
[Note to self: I think I have this
picture thing figured out]
4.
Deleted pages for Continental roster and biographical info on
Continental Line members.
5.
Revised the Contact page to add the beautiful picture of me and make it
load right, and fixed the links to our mail list.
January 29—Revised the
Equipment List for about the fifty jillionth time with
Continental references removed to better reflect our militia impression, and
it still needs work. AAAARGGHHH!
January 27—Our first organizational
meeting, and when we officially adopted our unit designation.
January 16—Added article to
Tondee’s Tavern called
Help Me, I’m Dyeing Here!
(Yes, we are a clever lot)
January 8—Added article to
Tondee’s Tavern about
leather. Sorry,
no whips and chains stuff. And
finally break all ties with GeoCities and begin exclusive use of Tripod.
I noted at the time that for some reason, during the days I was
uploading stuff to our new site, our GeoCities site mysteriously went down.
Never got a response from GeoCities as to why.
Hmmm. The old account
was cancelled. Also between
December and now had added a small hit counter, which gets up to about 240 or
so before the move. I forget to
transfer the number to the new hit counter.
Oops.
January 4—Added nice picture of the three-pounder
and started up the beta version of our site on Tripod.
Wow! 50M of space!
Still need a lot, though, to take care of Charlie’s picture page, which
is 2M (!) all by itself. [Note to
self: Wonder if this can be
fixed?]
January 3—Added article to
Tondee’s Tavern about
tumplines.
January 2—Lots of complaining to GaRefugee
mail list folks about crappy GeoCities service.
Began looking at Tripod and
January 2—Added a few photos to the photo
pages.
January 1—Massive computer network
failures, planes falling from the sky, power blackouts all around the country,
anarchy and chaos in the streets, dogs and cats living together, general
calamity and panic as The End of The World as We Know It actually happened.
You just didn’t hear about it because of the massive governmental
cover-up.
2000
Remainder of month of December spent
noodling around with stuff. As I
said up at the top, I can’t recall much of what I was doing to the site, other
than I remember it about this time that Yahoo! took over GeoCities for keeps,
and the file service went to the
December 14—Tondee’s
Tavern opens for business with the first three articles by
our members, and information about its namesake in
December 8—Boldly (or badly) going where
millions have already trod, we launch the original Georgia Refugee website on
GeoCities. Originally, this site
was strictly related to the Second Georgia Regiment and was a testament to how
little I know about building a website, with lots of .doc files imbedded with
images. Slow to load?
Why yes! But, it was the
best we had way back then.