George & I

When I was a Life Scout and getting ready to do my Eagle project, I decided that I wanted to do something to benefit American History. I decided that the best way to do this was to restore a cemetery to the best of my abilities. Naturally, I wanted to pick a cemetery where I could restore a Civil War tombstone. So I went around to different cemeteries in our area and took some notes on each one. Then I met George… I was walking around in the Weishample Church of God cemetery when I saw a stone off in the Northwestern corner all alone, broken in half, with a shabby flag slowly waving in the small breeze. I brushed away some dirt and could see “George, son of George and Mary Traub.” Something at that moment told me that George and I were going to be close friends. I decided to do that cemetery, and started my research on George and his unit. It wasn’t easy considering the stone broke right on his service record. On top of that, there were so many different spellings of his name on different military records that half the time I couldn’t even remember what his stone said. Then I began to notice something. On every military record, George was mustered into service at the age of 18, yet on his tombstone, he was only 16 when he died. That is when I realized that George was basically the same age as I was when he lied to the government about his age and joined the army. Anyway, I completed my project, and the group that was pulled together fixed and restored 50 tombstones. George happened to be one of them. We placed the top half of his stone on the bottom half with some glue, then placed metal C-channel on the sides to hold it together better. It still stands strong today. This picture was taken later in the day when the project was completed, when I decided to look at everything that George could see for the past 150 years.