| I´d like to introduce
myself. My name is Mikel Uriguen and I live in Bilbao, a city in the Spanish
Basque-Country. I´m a long-time enthusiast of the American Civil War. On this site I´ve
tried to collect pictures of every general officer of the War. It´s usually interesting
to put a face with a name. The sources for this site have been other internet sites, a
few cartes-de-visite from my collection and, above all, the photographs which over the
years hundreds and hundreds of contributors have sent me. To those people I´d publically
like to give heartfelt thanks for helping to make this site what it is. Many of the
images have never previously been published and the opportunity to do so, and so be
able to share them with other enthusiasts, gives me a sense of pride and great
satisfaction.
From this web-page I'd like to encourage
anybody with photographs of Civil War generals to e-mail them to me so that I can add them
to the site.
I´d
also like to point out that the purpose of this site is not only to continue
adding photographs of all the Civil War generals but also to try to correct the many
errors of identification found in texts and on other web-sites. Excellent sources of
photographs such as the Library of Congress and especially the National Archives are
plagued by such errors, which unfortunately have a tendency to spread like invasive
garden weeds and reappear in other publications. Having said that, I'm quite
certain that on this web-site too, despite having spent long hours poring over
innumerable written and photographic sources as well as having consulted the opinions
of various experts, some mistakes will have been made. When the number of photographs in
circulation is small and the physical changes in the generals are great, due to age and/or
the different styles of the extravagant beards and moustaches favoured at the time,
finding similarities between photographs can be complicated and errors of identification
can quite easily be made.
I would also like to add that this web-site
doesn't receive any financial support of any kind and all expenses come out of my own
pocket. Neither do I receive help with researching the photographs, designing, setting up
and maintaining the site, or with the correspondence via e-mail that the site generates.
As I'm neither retired nor single, to use a juggling metaphor, it's often difficult to
keep the three balls that are the site, my job and my family in the air at the same
time. There will no doubt be a number of people who recognise me from my previous time on
the internet with this site's predecessor. There were various reasons
for pulling the plug on the earlier version but principal among them was
the stress and tiredness caused by maintaining it. I'd like to apologise for the
hiatus between sites but hopefully people will appreciate that all of this amounts to a
lot of work for one person. With this latest version my aim is obviously to manage it
as well as possible and to organise my time in such a way that I can keep on top of all
the work involved
In another section of this site
you´ll also find the pictures of those officers appointed to brigadier or major general
by brevet.
I hope you
enjoy using the site as much as I've enjoyed making it. |