Interesting! I hope you took photos. These old structures have a bad habit of disappearing. I've heard of the Austrian muskets, those were fairly common, but could you tell me about the Belgian ones? Did your dad use the bayonet to scrape the chicken coop? Imagine if the soldiers did that before going into battle. They'd immediately have a poisoned weapon!
If you or any of your members ever want to share your findings online, I'd be happy to host you on my blog. I get about 1,500 readers a month now and rising. There's been too much politics and book hustling on my blog this past week and I need to get back to more content-related posts.
Here are a couple of skirmish posts:

http://civilwarhorror.blogspot.com/2011/08/theres-no-such-thing-as-insignificant.html

http://civilwarhorror.blogspot.com/2011/11/creative-foraging-in-civil-war.html