To Defend All That Is Dear — The Soldiers Who Served Sturbridge, Massachusetts In the War For Independence, 1775–1783
By Walter J. Hersee
For generations, the Revolutionary War history of Sturbridge survived in fragments: names on monuments, entries in town records, scattered family histories, military rolls, pension files, probate papers, cemetery inscriptions, and stories repeated from one generation to the next.
To Defend All That Is Dear brings those fragments together in a carefully researched account of the men connected to Sturbridge who served during the American Revolution.
The book grew from a method made possible by the remarkable expansion of online archival access in recent years. Digitized military records, pension applications, town and vital records, probate files, newspapers, family histories, published books, cemetery documentation, and other historical collections were compared across multiple sources. Names, dates, residences, family relationships, and military service were checked against one another rather than accepted from a single record or earlier publication.
That approach produced more than a roster of soldiers. It uncovered overlooked men, corrected long-repeated errors, clarified uncertain identities, and restored individuals to the historical record. It also offers a practical model that families, historical societies, genealogists, and communities can use to investigate their own local veterans and forgotten histories.
Interwoven throughout the book are a series of narrative interludes that grew directly from the research. These stories move beyond dates and military units to reveal the people behind the records: families divided by war, soldiers who disappeared from town histories, unexpected acts of courage, mistaken identities, and lives reconstructed from evidence scattered across generations.
The result is both a history of one New England town and an example of what careful local research can accomplish when traditional records are combined with the growing world of digitized archives.
Written for general readers as well as historians and genealogists, To Defend All That Is Dear shows how the story of the American Revolution can still be expanded—one record, one family, and one forgotten soldier at a time.
Book Details
Price: $39.95 plus shipping.
Softcover
424 pages
Trim size: 6 × 9 inches
ISBN:979-8-9940361-0-5
Published by: Heritage Oak Press
Heritage Oak Press 