Today is the 245th anniversary of the ratification of the Franco-American Alliance. This is a First Day Cover for a stamp dedicated in York, Pennsylvania forty-five years ago today on the bicentennial of that ratification. The Continental Congress was meeting there because they were basically on the run from the British, who still controlled Philadelphia. That says something about the tenuousness of the American position three full years into the war. Here is an excerpt from the Congressional journal as posted on Yale’s important Avalon Project website. The stamp itself is an interesting piece of material culture. I was having a conversation yesterday with someone about the upcoming 250th. This person was born in the 1980s and thus unaware of the cultural significance of the 1970s Bicentennial. The stamp is a reminder that the commemorations of half a century ago stretched beyond 1976.

When people know of your interests in certain things they start sending news articles relating to those interests. Yesterday one came through my inbox about a dozen American American Revolutionary War soldiers whose remains were recently discovered in South Carolina. These were veterans of the Battle of Camden and likely from Maryland and Delaware. Those locales aren’t far from the Palmetto State, but to a young man who had likely never been more than 4-5 miles from the family farm it all would have all been distant and alien. For one thing, prior to the Revolution colonists paid more attention to events in London and the West Indies than they did to what was happening in the other North American colonies.

This is actually the second such story from the past year. Last August the remains of thirteen Hessians killed in the Battle of Red Bank were discovered in New Jersey. At the South Carolina battlefield, the remains of two soldiers fighting for the British—a Loyalist from North Carolina and Highlander from Scotland—were also discovered. Whether they were from the Carolinas, German principalities, France, Great Britain, the Six Iroquois Nations or somewhere else, one can only imagine what it’s like to lose your loved one so far from home. How much did the families ever even come to know?

One thing they have started doing with this more recent discoveries is taking DNA and other forensic samples in hopes of sharing the news with the descendants. Read more here and watch a brief video as well. Officials are having a ceremony this coming week. If there is coverage online, I will share it.

(image by Pi3.124 via Wikimedia Commons)