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by Teresa Martin

It's almost Memorial Day weekend, and as frequent readers know, I consider Memorial Day to be more than a way to sell patio furniture and kick off the summer season.

There is something in honoring the dead that is, for me at least, a moment worthy of pause - not to mention a moment for seeing the ways our digital world offers up new ways of remembering and honoring them.

Memorial Day started out as a series of local community observances for the Civil War dead. In 1868, General John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic issued for a General Order that designated May 30 as Decoration Day, a day for:

"... strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land."

It was the Civil War with 600,000 to 700,000 American dead that triggered Decoration Day. It was a death toll that touched everyone in the young country.

It was also the first death toll that was recorded with the powerful new technology of photography. Photography captured the horrors of war and loss in way never experienced before.

Technically, The US Civil War was the fourth war to be photographed (for enquiring minds the first was the Mexican-American War in 1846–1848). However, it was the first with an organized effort to document it visually, and it was the first where photojournalism left a record that stands today.

Of course technology alone doesn't change anything - it also takes a person who deploys it. In this case, the person was Mathew B. Brady.

Brady's contribution wasn't his own photographs, although he was a photographer and ceratinly made images of the war. The driving force was the way his studio organized departments of photographers to cover the war, hiring and deploying the first carmera-and-plate hauling journalists.

But that's not all. Both the Confederate and the Union governements caught on that they had the power to record images ... and they did. Equipment, personenel, battle sites -- all recorded less than 40 years after the very first permant image had been made.

There aren't any action photos - the technology to make them had not yet been invented. Photography itself was still in its practical infancy and it was the War Between the States that put this emerging technology to a practical test.

The most amazing thing was yet to come, though. Fast forward another hundred years and visit the US Library of Congress.

Here, for your digital browsing pleasure, are 7,309 of the known US Civil War images:

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search?st=grid&c=100&co=cwp

• Doctors examining a Federal prisoner returned from prison.
• Charles K. Irwin, doctor of the 72nd New York infantry, seated at the doorway of a tent with another man.
• Headquarters, Army of Potomac--Brandy Station, April 1864.
• Atlanta, Ga. City Hall and camp of 2d Massachusetts Infantry on the grounds.

Memorial Day isn't about the famous people or about the glory moments. It is about the men and women, the ordinary ones who left daily life because, for them, it was the right thing to do. It is about the ordinary ones who didn't return.

Remembering them in the abstract is hard. Seeing their faces is another thing all together. The images carry it all home.

Our digital era brings old photographic plates to a whole new audience. The plates are fragile, not easily shared, not easily accessed. The technology of hard plates remembers the story of war and its toll, while our digital technology brings those stories to our fingertips.

Plus, digitalization enables other passionate parties to share national memories, parties like the PA-based non-profit The Center for Civil War Photography - http://www.civilwarphotography.org/

Where the Library of Congress is an amazing digital database, the Center for Civil War Photography hosts small traditional exhbits at Civil War sites combined with a global reach in digital exhibits (http://www.civilwarphotography.org/exhibits/online-exhibits). In these digital exhibits images, themes, and history interweave.

Did you know that this week in history, Alexander Gardner and others recorded images of the Grand Review of the Union Armies on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington? Or have you ever watched a video of wet plate photography underway?

The power of digital collections opens up more than photos. Handwritten letters form the other large set of Civil War memories, but until libraries began turning old paper into digital files ... well, their impact was felt only by a very few.

In contrast, for example, take a visit to the University of Virginia Library's Civil War collections: http://etext.virginia.edu/civilwar/

Hey, isn't it cool that you CAN visit with just a click? And that you can read letters - in the original handwriting or transcribed into easier-to-follow text? And look at family Bibles. And see Census record data? And view battlefields through interactive maps?

In 1868, General John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic issued for a General Order that designated May 30 as a day to remember the Civil War dead.

Who would have guessed that nearly a century and a half later we'd be able to see their faces and read their words and remember ... remember that they were real, that they believed in something, and that they are part of who we all are today. And remember it all through a very 21st century technology.

Archived OpenCape columns? Check out last Memorial Day's column about Map the Fallen ( http://www.capeeyes.com/columns/2009/2009-05-26memorialday.html)