Mathews resident Martha McCartney, a research historian and writer, has compiled a resource book containing biographical information on over 700 local people who participated in the Revolutionary War. She worked on it as a member of the Gloucester 250 Committee. Titled “Gloucester and Mathews Counties: Revolutionary War Participants,” the book explores the lives of war veterans, loyalists, slaves, female military supporters, widows of veterans, and even deserters, often through the claims they made for losses incurred. McCartney combed through more than four dozen resources for the book, including those used by Elizabeth Dutton Lewis, who compiled a list of local Revolutionary War veterans, “Revolutionary War Roster,” for the bicentennial in 1976; Peter Wilson Coldham, a British man whose work “American Migrations 1765–1799,” published in 2000, lists numerous American loyalists obtained through British sources; Marion Gilroy, whose 1937 book “Loyalists and Land Settlement in Nova Scoti...