Donald Peter Moriarty

Donald Peter Moriarty is a retired lieutenant colonel of artillery, a Vietnam veteran, who served in the US Army from 1957 to 1980. A native of Alexandria, Louisiana, currently residing in southern California, he was a system engineer and program manager with Hughes Aircraft Company in Fullerton, California from 1980 until 1995. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics from Louisiana State University and a master's degree in history from Florida Atlantic University, later indulging in additional study in patristics at Keble College of Oxford University in England. An ardent genealogist, he has published a number of manuscripts in the Louisiana Genealogical Register. He became interested in the Orleans Light Horse in the late 1960s while compiling the story of his great-grandfather, William Ambrose Moriarty, a member of that cavalry troop. When he found it virtually impossible to locate any meaningful information on the Light Horse, he decided to compile that unit's history himself, coaxing from disparate sources a story hidden for 150 years.