Preliminaries

Company G, 147th, P. V. I.

BY  CORPORAL     J. A. LUMBARD.

PRELIMINARIES

The following history was published in the SNYDER COUNTY TRIBUNE, Selinsgrove, PA., J. A. Lumbard Editor, from January 13, 1876 to June 27, 1878.  The document from which this copy was produced consisted of photo-copies from a microfiche copy of a document that was made up from newspaper clippings of the original publication that were pasted into a book.  The copying was very poor and often segments of pages were black in the center of the book when it was not flat enough for the copying.  In addition many pages were speckled with spots that gave the OCR program difficulty with recognition.  While it was possible to guess at most of the missing words, there are six places in the document where the missing words are replaced by question marks, one for each letter that must have been in the word.  The reader is left to supply his/her best guess.

Lumbard appears to have been a frustrated poet and the language is even more flowery than the times would support.  This along with his rather liberal, and seemingly random, use of commas with an accompanying reluctance to use periods, and an excessive use of clichés, makes for tedious reading at times.  However, the recounting of the events is quite interesting and well worth the patience the reader may need to make it to the end.  Many of the events are the same as in the diary of Michael S. Schroyer, but in many places it provides more detail than Schroyer.  It is more than twice the length of Schroyer’s, but then Lumbard often uses two or three times as many words to describe an event than does Schroyer.         W. L. HAFLEY

Most of the articles can be found on microfiche at the Snyder County Historical Society, Middleburg Pa.