Farewell to the Founder of AmericanRevolution.org

Ed St. Germain, who launched the AmericanRevolution.org website in 1999, died early this month at the age of sixty-three. St. Germain was a U.S. Navy corpsman in the Vietnam War, and later a Deputy District Attorney in California. Researching American life in the eighteenth century was his longtime passion.

St. Germain was early to recognize the world wide web as a way for historians, especially amateur historians, to share information with other researchers. AmericanRevolution.org offers links to many historical resources and reenacting groups, and served as a repository for people’s essays. Before Google Books came along, it was up to individuals like St. Germain to do the grunt work of providing a full transcript of Dr. James Thacher’s Military Journal of the American Revolutionary War or page images of The Compleat Letter Writer.

I never met St. Germain, but I participated in online discussions with him and pointed to his site several times. It turns out, per his San Bernardino Sun obituary, that we had other things in common. He worked for many years in Riverside, California, where I was born, and it looks like we have common ancestors in John and Elizabeth Howland of Plymouth.