December, 2019 – In advance of interview with Travis McDaniel for an“1864 Documentary” I was working on I began researching William Clayton Fain and Captain William Jefferson Rodgers of Company D; 4th Georgia Cavalry. I found Rodgers’ service records but they were pretty spars so it led me to begin looking into the 4th Georgia Cavalry which it turns out there were two of. One in North Georgia under the command of Colonel Issac W. Avery, the future editor of the Atlanta Constitution and the other in South Georgia under the command of Colonel Duncan Lamont Clinch.

While searching obscure internet links, I came across a bulletin board style website called “Civil War Talk” which mentions of the writings of one ‘Alva’ Shaw published at the beginning of the 20th Century in the Walker County Messenger (WCM).

“Have you seen the Memoir that was printed in the Walker County Messenger by Alva Shaw? First entry was on December of 1901 and runs through most of 1902. Shaw only serves in the 4th for a little over a year and then gets wounded in the Atlanta Campaign”.

To find the archives of the Walker County Messenger also took a little searching – it’s not part of newspapers.com’s extensive archive. Finally I located an online resource called the Georgia Historic Newspapers Archive. The archive is a project of the Digital Library of Georgia and a part of Georgia’s Virtual Library GALILEO, based at the University of Georgia Libraries – luckily it had scans of most WCM issues from that time period.