Fanny Yates Cohen (1840-1938) was the great grandmother of our COL Henry Taylor. During our Christmas party this year, 2019, COL Taylor read a section of her diary describing the ‘thirteen days of Christmas’ of Gen. Sherman’s occupation of Savannah. Fanny Cohen was residing in Savannah, Georgia when the forces of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891) occupied the city on December 21, 1864 during Sherman’s March to the Sea. During the occupation she kept a journal, in which she described the impact on her family. Her diary covers December 21, 1864, the day Sherman’s troops entered Savannah, through January 3, 1865. The diary consists of four sheets of lined blue paper that may have been bound together at 
one time. Fanny Cohen’s journal is in the Phillips-Myers Papers in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina – donated in 1944 to this collection by Fanny Cohen’s daughter, Mrs. Fergus C. Hayne, of Long Island, New York.
Fanny Cohen married Henry Taylor, grandfather of COL Henry Taylor of the Old Guard of the Gate City Guard who provided this copy of the text.