GDG- GB Timelines

[John Leo]

HI Dick,

	You are right of course about the accuracy and
synchronization of clocks and watches as an impediment
to the timeline problem.

	There is another problem that rarely gets mentioned
though. In my dozen half days at the Park library, I noticed
that Federal letters and reports were about 5X to 10X as
frequent as the Confederate records. This means that
Confederate actions will mostly be missing and only some
times for the Federals will exist. How would anyone deal
with a situation that says that  "Confederates started their
attack at 3PM but three Federal records insist that the actual time
was 4:15, or 4:30, etc." Do you take a simple mean? That would
imply that all 4 records were equally reliable. Do you weight the
value to derive a weighted mean? How much believability is
there in each of the 4 records?

	All I want to know is where SR Johnson went and what he saw
and heard. But there are lots of things about the battle that (sigh) we will
just never know (short of a time machine or a UTUBE feature :-)  :-)  ).

Take Care,

John  Leo