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Book Reviews These are some reviews from a recent issue of
The Civil War News:
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“Is She Kate?” The Woman Major General John Fulton Reynolds Left Behind
Marian Latimer
Illustrated, sources, softcover, 56 pp., 2005. Farnsworth Military Impressions, 415 Baltimore St., Gettysburg, PA 17325, $9.95 plus shipping.
I picked up this short volume hoping that reading its pages would help me better understand the woman who stole Gen. John Reynolds’s heart. Unfortunately, by the time I was done I felt that I was still just as much in the dark as when I started. Author Latimer writes well and seems to have done a lot of work in putting this volume together. Unfortunately, as with a lot of genealogical research, there are dead ends, illiterate ancestors, different name spellings for different generations, destroyed records, no records, etc., etc., etc., all leading to, in many cases, guesswork. Kate (Catherine Mary) Hewitt was born in the 1830s in upstate New York. She spent some time in San Francisco around 1860 and met John Reynolds during the return trip to the East Coast. Following Reynolds’s death at Gettysburg, Kate basically disappeared, not running away and joining a convent as the heart-stirring story goes (her temperament was not suited to the cloistered life), but eventually moving back to New York and becoming a recluse. Dying in 1902 Kate was buried in the family plot in Stillwater Union Cemetery in Saratoga County, New York. The book is one long chapter with no endnotes or footnotes, making it basically useless as a research tool. The sources indicate a lot of time on the Internet but where that information fits into the text is impossible to decipher. In addition, many of the connections in the story, interpretation of information and conclusions sometimes seem to be a stretch. Despite this reviewer’s reservations, “Is She Kate?” is an interesting read and I would recommend picking it up. Just don’t look at it as the definitive work on John Fulton Reynolds’s true love.
Blake A. Magner
Blake A. Magner is the Book Review Editor of The Civil War News. He makes his liv-ing as an editor, writer, car-tographer and photographer of Civil War history. He is author of At Peace With Honor: The Civil War Burials of Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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