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1.27.2021: Spent some time this afternoon at Marietta National Cemetery. I like to stop by on occasion to thank the men and women resting there for the freedom that I enjoy. Today, I randomly took a quick photo of a headstone and decided to see if I could find any information about that soldier. Here is what I discovered: 

Private William Britt was an Irish immigrant who settled in Paris, Tennessee. At the age of thirty-eight, he enlisted on October 1, 1862 in Company M of the Fifth Iowa Cavalry. Britt did his share of the fighting and was wounded and taken prisoner on July 30, 1864, in the encounter at Chehaw, Alabama. Research has suggested that he and seven other troopers wounded at Chehaw were hospitalized at Notasulga where he perished the first week of August. Britt was buried at the Marietta National Cemetery, but his grave was not identified with certainty. It was left to David Evans, author of “Sherman's Horsemen: Union Cavalry Operations in the Atlanta Campaign,” to positively identify his final resting place. Once that was accomplished, the military made preparations to provide the grave with an appropriate marker. The ceremony (in 1999) was made all the more meaningful by the fact that the members of the Irish parish where he was baptized in 1824 sent a piece of sod from his ancestral gravesite to be placed upon his grave in the "new world" where he had made his home…and for which he had offered his life. (Novum Scriptorium)27/365