Not to be confrontational but I really don’t think you have any inkling of the extent of the undertaking. A core group of people took on the Oakwood challenge approximately 5 years ago in an effort to replace the do nothing faction of the SCV who were in control of the money and get permission to start on the cemetery. This has involved untold trips to Richmond from the Tidewater area and points west, meeting with unresponsive politicians, attending court proceedings, meeting with relatives of soldiers who are buried there and many more weekends working in the cemetery. All at their own expense. Hardly a week has gone by in the last several years that one or more of the group has not gone to Richmond for one or two days trying to remove road blocks thrown up by various city officials who don’t want this project to succeed. Now you come out of the woodwork and want to criticize what they have accomplished and put your spin on it. Shame on you.

If you want to say that this is the SCVs sand box, so be it. Nobody else wanted it. Nobody else volunteered to spend countless hours fighting for the right to recognize the soldiers buried there. No one else spent weekends working in the cemetery. No one except those people in the group will ever know how much trouble it was to get to the point we are at now.

FYI the City of Richmond records which you could not access contained 8,600 names. It was not easy to gain access to these records as you stated but it was done. The efforts of the SCV have expanded this list to approximately 11,400 names with the help of many descendants. Will you volunteer to enter these 11,400 names on an online data base? One volunteer in the group worked most every day for over a year just checking and transcribing the 8,600 names from that list.

If you really want to get from behind your keyboard and get involved in this project go to this page http://www.scvva.org/Oakwood/index.html and join the Friends and Descendants organization. Updates on the restoration can also be found at this site.

Best Regards