Steve Procko

Steve Procko never thought of himself as a Civil War history buff, let alone a biographer. He does love history; however. He particularly loves learning about the small, everyday events in the lives of little known people and the small towns they lived in. A documentarian and photographer, Steve was sleuthing for stories for a videos he has developed—the Emmy-nominated series “There’s History Around Every Bend” when he came across the writings of Private Arba F. Shaw. The down-to-earth accounts of the everyday life of a lowly private struggling to survive one of the greatest events in American history fascinated Steve. As he read the series of articles, mostly unread since they were published in a small, North Georgia newspaper between 1901 and 1903, he began to realize that they were a valuable cache of history. The result was his award-winning first book, Rebel Correspondent. Steve’s second book, Captured Freedom, was inspired when an intriguing, ragged photograph of twelve men taken on January 2, 1865 that was shared with him by a neighbor in the North Georgia mountains. "That man on the left is my great-great Uncle", the man said. The weathered photograph itself had an interesting story to tell. It had been misidentified from almost the moment a Knoxville photographer had taken it in 1865. More than 150 years later the men’s identities were still being presented incorrectly in several major institutions around the country. It was a self-perpetuating error that needed remedied. Thus began a journey that would take more than two years. The true identities and stories behind all of the men in the image were meticulously uncovered. The errors of history corrected. The story of the lives and war-time experiences of the men in the photograph revealed a remarkable story of survival - one that had never been told. Until now.