On display at the Midwest Genealogy Center is a collection of replica Revolutionary War flags courtesy of the Kansas City Chapter, Missouri Society of the Sons of the Revolution and the Harry S. Truman Chapter of the Missouri Society, Sons of the American Revolution. Stars and Stripes, the Grand Ole Flag, the Star-Spangled Banner or whatever you call it, the thirteen stripes and fifty stars we know today is not the flag the country used during its battle for freedom. In the Revolutionary War, each colony, each military unit, had its own flag.
It must have been a muggy night in the Chesapeake; the air thick with gunpowder that fogged the streaks and bursts of cannonfire fired from the British Royal Navy upon Fort McHenry. Blasts and roaring booms broke taut moments of silence, and American patriot Francis Scott Key watched from a distance, not knowing if the United States had survived the day long offensive. It was September 14, 1814, and the future of the United States was in the gravest of dangers. How could he have felt, knowing that his country, still in its infancy, clung to the hope that the soldiers
