GDG- Re: Gettysburg Digest, Vol 30, Issue 3

[David W. Gaddy]

Topic 10 (Tom Ryan on Henry Kid/Kide Douglas)
Tom,
I do not want to trust failing memory, but I could almost swear that it was 
Fletcher M. Green (editor of "I Rode with Stonewall") who corrected me and 
said that it was pronounced "kid." And I have since used that 
pronunciation. Based upon the first-hand experience of a family in which 
the husband said "MONT-ee CHELL-a" and the wife said "Monty-SELL-a" and the 
humiliation of being told, for example, that "tib-ih-tha" [Tibitha] was 
actually pronounced TYE-bu-thu, I developed a rule of thumb about Virginia 
names: (1) Try to get a local, native-born Virginian to say it first. (2) 
Do NOT ask a second one. Again, see the notes by Richard Harwell in his 
edition of Richard Taylor's memoirs, "Destruction and Reconstruction," pp. 
338-339.
V/R
Dave Gaddy