November 15, 2011
PRESENTER
John A. O’Brien has been a student of the Civil War since being run over by Pickett’s Charge during the centennial reenactment at Gettysburg. He attributes reading Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The War Years in high school to starting his lifelong interest in the 16th president. A native of Pennsylvania, he began exploring Lincoln sites in Washington after moving to Hyattsville in 2005. His project started out of curiosity to find where the many events occurred that were described in the standard texts. O’Brien made a hobby of finding source documents in the Library of Congress, National Archives and contemporary news reports to match the stories with the sites. When not engaged in researching Lincoln in Washington, O’Brien is a hospital administrator in Maryland. John and wife Marilyn have three grown daughters in the Washington area and are members of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, where they sometimes sit in the Lincoln pew. John has been a Lincoln Group of Washington member since 2008.
