Notable Volunteers
Sumter Light Guards, Company K, 4th Regiment Georgia Volunteer Infantry in April 1861. (Library of Congress)
CCWP is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and depends on volunteers to fulfill its mission. If you are interested in volunteering for the Center for Civil War Photography, email Bob Zeller at BobZeller@civilwarphotography.org.
The Center for Civil War Photography chooses one volunteer for its Volunteer of the Year Award. The award is presented to the recipient at the Annual Image of War Seminar. Past winners include:
In just the past decade or so, Brady has become one of the major private collectors of Civil War stereoviews, amassing an impressive and significant collection with a relentless enthusiasm that includes regular hunting trips to the antique shows, flea markets and antique stores of New England.
But he has done more than simply collect. Keith has shared his knowledge, and used his collection to build his own knowledge, studying some of the photographers he collects and bringing unknown or little-known information to light.
In his 2010 Battlefield Photographer lead article, Keith told us about the Bierstadt Brothers and their brief foray to the front in 1861. In 2012, Keith and Randolph I. James gave us a fascinating feature about photographer William E. James’s trip to Charleston in 1865 to capture the raising of the flag over Fort Sumter. And earlier this year, Keith authored the article on George Stacy’s Fort Monroe photographs in an appropriate prelude to our seminar visit there in October.
As you might expect from an all-around nice guy, Keith is always generous with his time, his images and his expertise. And his gifts of vintage photography and stereo viewers to the seminar raffle are always some of our best donations. For all of these reasons and more, the CCWP selected Keith B. C. Brady as its Volunteer of the Year for 2013.
Danninger won the 2009 Volunteer of the Year award for his help on several projects, most notably his creation of a program that automatically matched 1,100+ captions and images during CCWP’s upload of postwar Gettysburg photos to Yahoo’s photo sharing site, Flickr. Tom’s interest in Gettysburg began when he took his wife there on their honeymoon in 1970. Since then, he has spent 39 years developing software, most of that time with IBM. He lives in Cary, N.C., with his wife and enjoys finding ways of combining the Civil War, mapping, photography and software.
When he’s not breaking new ground on his own in Civil War photography, John Kelley often can be found working on behalf of the Center for Civil War Photography on one of its many projects. In addition to his contributions to this newsletter, and his lecture at the 2004 Image of War seminar, John has been an essential volunteer with the CCWP Digital Archive Project and other efforts.
John and his wife, Norma, have been CCWP members since 2003 and have been at every seminar since 2004. John received a Master’s Degree in American History from the University of Bridgeport in 1970, but his “deep love for Civil War photography” was set in motion in 1978 after purchasing Francis T. Miller’s 10-volume Photographic History of the Civil War. John recalls, “I focused on the photography of Captain Andrew J Russell in the Fredericksburg area and George N. Barnard’s images of Atlanta. In those days, I would visit such places as the West Point Library, the Photographic Library in Rochester, the Onondaga Historical Society, and I corresponded with William Frassanito and William C. Davis.
Among other discoveries, John found the stereo viewer in the middle of the photograph of Atlanta by George N. Barnard — a discovery featured in the CCWP newsletter— and was the first to put together the five-image Fredericksburg at War panorama featured at the Beyond Brady exhibition.