When Rebecca Blackwell Drake crushed her shoulder in an accident some years ago, she turned from one keyboard to another, from a piano to a computer, from music to history.

Becky, as her friends call her, was a music teacher and a concert pianist, but with her injured shoulder and pulled back muscles, she was no longer able to practice and couldn’t stretch to reach the keys.

Now her keyboard is on a computer, perhaps a quirk of fate that she began researching and writing history. She has eight books of local history to her credit along with numerous newspaper articles about people and places of the past.

Her latest volume, “Leaves: The Diary of Elizabeth Meade Ingraham,” was co-edited with Sue Burns Moore of Longview, Texas. It isn’t just another Civil War diary — it’s an account written by the Rebel sister of Yankee Gen. George Gordon Meade of Gettysburg fame. Mrs. Ingraham was from Pennsylvania but lived near Willows in north Claiborne County where she and her husband owned a large plantation, Ashwood, and a fine home.