By ANNE MILLER, Staff writer
First published: Wednesday, December 4, 2002

As a child, Guy Lounsbury never knew why his aunt brought flowers to a grave on a lonely hillside outside Berne.

Then in October Lounsbury stumbled upon the diary of Berne native and Civil War veteran George Warner, posted on the town historian's Web site. Warner wrote about Lounsbury's great-great-grandfather, David Gathen, who survived the War between the States, and Gathen's best friend, Joel Wilson, who did not.

Lounsbury realized his aunt's flowers had been for her father's best friend. This fall Lounsbury and his mother resurrected the tradition.

"We've adopted him again, my Mom and me," he said.

Lounsbury is one of about 20 Hilltowners who have not only discovered the Web site dedicated to Berne's history. They have also devoted themselves to it, turning it into one of the Capital Region's most detailed, and painstakingly researched, local histories on the Internet.

The grass-roots effort plans to gather information on the graves of Revolutionary War and Civil War veterans and to write the story of Hessian mercenaries who fought for the British during the Revolution -- including one who joined the Colonists' cause and is an ancestor of a research volunteer.

The Web site at www.bernehistory.org overseen by Town Historian Ralph Miller and his brother, Harold. Until this year, most of the information the Berne historian handled involved genealogy requests. He started posting information gleaned from such requests along with his own research into the Miller family tree.

"I was going to do all of the work myself," Ralph Miller said. "I figured that it would take me 10 years to put all that information on a computer."

Six years into the job he is ahead of schedule.

Harold Miller handles the technical aspects of the Web site, based at the home he retired to in Oaxaca, Mexico. He orchestrates postings and answers questions via e-mail.

"We were originally brought together when we realized that we were each intensely involved in complementary projects," he said of the lay historians.

Recently he learned that the accepted history of Berne is incorrect. "The story goes that the town was settled by seven families arriving together, led by Jacob Weidman about 1750," Miller said in an e-mail interview last week. "The genealogical records of births, baptisms, marriages, deaths and burials show that these families actually arrived over about a 20-year period, and that there were many families already in Berne when they arrived."

The Web site's main feature is Warner's diaries for 1862 and 1863, posted in mid-October with detailed footnotes. The terse entries shed light on the life of a farm boy turned soldier. In the space of a year, Warner went from cutting 10 cords of wood before breakfast to watching his friends die of swamp disease in Louisiana.

The soldiers' lives were so bad in the South that the Berne boys resorted to stealing chickens. Gathen lost both eyes in a raid when a farmhand spotted them, Warner wrote.

Lounsbury said he had always been told that his great-great-grandfather's wounds were suffered in battle. He began wondering what else was not true.

Lounsbury, who is a utility engineer for the state telecommunications division, often spends his lunch hours researching Civil War muster rolls in the State Archives. He is a computer specialist for the Air National Guard and occasionally visits Civil War battlefields on his way home from guard duty.

Originally, Ralph and Harold Miller thought that about a quarter of the young men of Berne fought for the Union. Lounsbury's research caused them to place that estimate closer to half.

"You talk about the Civil War and how towns were decimated by it," Lounsbury said. "Really they were. They lost all their young men."

Like a kid with a new friend, Lounsbury is delighted to take visitors on a tour of Civil War graves, especially Wilson's.

During the 20-minute drive into the hills, Lounsbury kept up a constant narration. The area was more populous in the mid-1800s, he said. That afternoon his minivan didn't pass a soul.

He parked on the side of the road in front of a former one-room church. The foundation bows now. The chimney crumbles. The wood siding that remains has weathered to a dull gray. Where Wilson and Gathen once farmed, pine trees and silver beeches now stand.

Through the silent graveyard Lounsbury retraces the steps of his aunt, leaving deep prints in the snow. "I like to come up here and just think," he said. "It's so quiet."

He brushed snow off Wilson's grave and off the tops of the stones of other veterans so passers-by, however few, might know people were buried there. He doesn't want them to be forgotten again.