This week we received the names and documents for our soldiers. I am still in the process of indexing all my papers, but have compiled a short list of some important statistics about my soldier and am excited by the bit I have learned. I was surprised by how exciting it was to see his handwriting and how little details–like the fact that he had grey eyes–make him feel more real to me. I also have found it very interesting as I have given the papers a cursory glance to realize that I have a great deal of information about his wife. She survived him by almost twenty years and my files contain many records of her Widow’s Pension claims, so I am looking forward to incorporating her into my work as an important part of Bolton’s life. I was also very pleased to find census records from his childhood home, with a bit of info about his parents and siblings.
Another thing that stands out is the large number of medical files. He appears to have suffered from his war injuries for many many years after the war.
On the technical side, I am still working out what machine is best for me to work on. I couldn’t figure out how to rotate images on dropbox and quickly realized that reading photocopies of 19th Century handwriting while tilting my head was really not working. And the ipad I originally was working on, while more tiltable than my desktop, was just too small to get a good view. But I’ve downloaded all the images to my desktop so now, as long as I am at home, I can comfortably work on them. This might cause issues during classroom work sessions, so I am still trying to decide if it would be worth investing in a laptop.
Speaking of difficulties with handwriting, I also noticed that while many of Bolton’s records have been transcribed none of the papers concerning Addie (Bolton’s wife) have been transcribed, so I’ll have to take some time and maybe make a few transcriptions myself. I’m making a trip to the Library of Congress Archives in March in association with another course and I am tempted to try to pull up the originals of some of these papers. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?
One bit of information I struggled to find was a birth date. I noticed that his death certificate listed his age down to the day, and intend to calculate his birthdate using that information. For now I’ve just listed the year of his birth. I did find it interesting, though, that that piece of information didn’t seem to find its way into any of his official forms, unless I have somehow missed it.
Congrats with citing. Your sources are great.