Recently, I stumbled across footnote.com. It’s a site that urges its visitors to help them “Make History Together.” The site contains images of millions of original historical documents. From what I gather, our job is to footnote (hence the name of the site) the images/documents with whatever information we might have. They’re looking for things like photos, comments, links to other documents, personal anecdotes, etc. to add to their existing listings.
The topic that caught my eye was an effort by a photographer who took 6,301 images of the Vietnam Memorial and had them stitched together to form one large image. All 58,256 names were identified and made searchable along with basic military data from The National Archives.
I have a first cousin whose name is on the wall. He was the Godfather I never knew. I also didn’t know many of the simple things that were listed. He was in Vietnam only 2 months before he was killed. He was a Corporal. He celebrated his 20th birthday in Vietnam. He would have been 59 today.
The link below will take you to Junior’s place on the wall.
http://www.footnote.com/image/48273037
Feel free to add any personal information to the listing.