Blenheim Blog

The categories I have selected for my Omeka website pages are as follows:

Before the War:

        Early Life:  This section will include census records regarding his early childhood and what small info I have about his birth place/date etc.

     As a Young Adult:  Census records that show him working as a servant on a neighboring farm.  Maybe some info about serving life?

        Leaving Michigan for war:  here I will share my Ngram graphs and discussion of how this man who, other than the war, didn’t really travel more than a few miles from his place of birth, may have been swept up into the war.  This section will include some information about recruitment in Michigan and the numbers of men who served from there, as well as a picture of the importance of the war to the country as a whole.

    During the War

        Cavalry- info about the Michigan cavalry’s role in the war.  The lifestyle/work of the cavalry  vs infantry etc

        Blenheim House – His signature.  History of Blenheim and why he was there

        Gettysburg – Information about the battle and about the injuries Marvin sustained there.

         Map- Map of his years in the war.  Right now the map just has places where important things happened to Marvin, trying to decide how much of the regiment’s movements to add into that.

    Family Life

        Addie’s Story – Present his wife’s life story

        Children – a little about his children

    Marvin’s Farm

        Farm Life in Michigan- some info about his farm and about typical farms of the area

        Neighbors – I have several affidavits from Marvin’s neighbors, thought I’d present those and some brief info about those people

        Inheritance-  Marvin made some changes to his will near the end of his life, thought I’d discuss those here and also some of the tax issues Addie faced after his death

      Map- Here I thought I’d put the map that shows his birth place, childhood farm, postwar far, and place of marriage.  Remarkable mostly because they are clustered so close together.

  Marvin’s Health

        Injury at Gettysburg- description of his injury sustained at Gettysburg and how it might have been treated.

        Worsening effects – discussion of the many doctor’s reports and the deterioration of his health related to his injuries.  How it affected his work

        Marvin’s Death – Description of Marvin’s death.

It feels really good to have this outlined.  I kind of wish I had done this weeks ago.  I feel like I have a lot of work still to do, but this has helped me sort out where to narrow in my efforts.

I have had entirely too much fun playing with Google’s Ngram tool over the last few days.  I’ve played with everything from the trending history of my children’s names to the popularity of mythical creatures.  What a fun little tool it is.  However, it also has interesting applications for historical thought.  In the case of my project for this course, I’ve decided the most interesting charts are these two comparing the usage of the words “wounded” and “soldier” in American English to the usage of those same words in British English:

In American English these words have a very notable spike around the years of the Civil War, and a lesser, but still significant spike around 1812, when we would have been fighting the War of 1812.  There are also very small bumps around the years of the two World Wars.

In Britain, however, those World War years have huge spikes, equal to those of Civil War American English. Particularly during the First World War, for some reason the second war ranks a much less marked increase.

To me, the interesting fact about this comparison is that it shows that here in America the Civil War was comparable in national attention to the attention Europe paid to the wars that tore it apart in the next century.  Certainly it occupied American attention more than those other wars did, and with good cause as the fatalities from the Civil War far outnumbered those Americans suffered during the World Wars.  Putting myself back into Marvin’s story, this explains how a young farm boy who, other than his war years, never lived more than a few miles from the home he was born in, was swept up into this great national drama.  It illustrates how this war dominated American thought and culture during the years it raged.

Note:  If the full diagrams are not viewable in your browser window, please click here and here for the full versions.

Completed my weekend of Daytum recording.  I’m not sure I learned very much.  I don’t really drink anything but water, so that graph is amusingly simple.  I added in .5 blue icee because I sipped some of my husband’s drink at the movies and decided it made the graph more interesting than just a big blue circle.  I did realize that I interact with a lot of people on a daily basis, so that graph is very crowded, though my family members compose a notable majority.   It was interesting on that one to play with some different display options.  The data makes more sense, to me, in a bar graph than a pie chart; and calculating an average for that number was pretty pointless, since there was such a wide disparity in my frequency of interactions–while my family members showed up 9-12 times each, most of the other people on my list only interacted with me 1 or 2 times over the weekend.

As far as how this applies to my project with Marvin…first, I need to dig more into the stats on soldiers and decide where I want to go with his charts.  I had to leave class early that week due to a family emergency, and have not yet taken the time to fully catch up.  However, I am seeing that different kinds of display are interesting depending on what I want to highlight.  If he is notable in some way–unique from other soldiers–that can be interesting to note on some kind of chart.  While he seems to be pretty typical in most ways, I’m not sure what the most interesting way to present that information might be.

So, I am still a little stumped on that, but giving it more thought and hoping inspiration will strike.

This week we played with mapping through Google Maps.  I was able to place Marvin’s birthplace, childhood home, and the farm he owned after the war.  They are all within a dozen miles of each other.  So the war was clearly his only significant venture outside of his immediate world.    I think this, in an of itself, is an interesting fact.  I definitely still want to do more research on Michigan farms.  I think it would be nice to put the map I created and attach maybe some photos or writings about typical Michigan farms, I have lists of some of the livestock etc they had on the farm so I should be able to come up with a pretty good description of farm life, as it would have been on Bolton’s farm.

In addition to that, I need to make a thorough map of his military years, especially as that was his only real foray outside Michigan.  I have created one with all the places I definitely know he was–places where he enlisted, mustered, was wounded, etc.  But I need to complete my tracking of his unit’s movement to flesh out that picture a bit.

This week we officially began our websites through omeka.net and began uploading images, with all their accompanying metadata.  The metadata thing takes some getting used to.  It is pretty tedious.  Though it became progressively less so, as many of the fields (Source, Publisher, Rights etc) are the same from one item to the next.   And the fields which are different do force me to analyze the documents more closely, which is always a good thing.   This week I uploaded a few images regarding Marvin’s marriage and farm.  I wish I had more time available this weekend to dive into it a little more (my personal/family life has been a little chaotic this week but I hope to devote more time to this project next week.)  I am looking forward to taking some time to sort through all of my info and decide which specific documents are most interesting/important in the story I am hoping to tell.  I also need to dig into the secondary sources I’ve collected on Zotero and decide which are most relevant/interesting to include.

I appreciated Dr. Robertson’s outline of the final project which he emailed out this week.  I need to finish mapping Marvin’s unit’s movements during the war.  I think I have a pretty good picture of Marvin’s life before and after the war and obviously Gettysburg was an important part of his story, but all the other movements of the unit, I’m still working on.  It is a little amusing, while filling in the movements,  to notice that all the places they traveled and fought were, well, right here.  I’m sure that seems obvious and is probably old news to most of the class who grew up here, but having grown up in the American West, I’m still oddly excited to be in the actual places where history happened.  I mean, obviously history happened where I grew up too, but even by American standards, Utah History is pretty sparse.

Marvin Bolton was born in 1840, the fifth of eight children in a large Michigan farming family.  In 1860, at the age of twenty he was living on his parent’s farm and working as a servant.  In 1861, he joined the Army as a part of the 1st Michigan Cavalry.  On July 3rd, 1863, Marvin was wounded in the battle at Gettysburg.  While engaging in hand to hand combat, he was struck over the head repeatedly by two soldiers with sabers, removing sizable pieces of his skull.  The aftermath of these injuries would plague him for the rest of his life.  After brief treatment in Pennsylvania, he was transferred to hospital in Washington and spent the remainder of his enlistment on furlough in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.

Presumably, he returned home to Michigan directly after his discharge (8/22/1864.)  He was married to Addie Goodwin on November 10, 1867 and returned to farming, at some point taking control of his father-in-law’s farm.  (I believe he held the deed in trust–possibly his father in law had no male heirs?  I need to dig a little deeper into understanding the property documents)  Marvin and Addie had four children–Melvin, Jr. born 5/25/1871; May, born 6/7/1873; Rosie, born 11/23/1876; and Fred born 3/22/1881.

Marvin applied repeatedly for an increase in his pension as his disabilities worsened over the course of many years.  Medical professionals increased his disability from 1/4 disabled in 1877 to 1/2 disabled in 1878 and 3/4 disabled in 1886.  In each case, his disabilities were directly linked to his injuries sustained at Gettysburg (it was frequently noted that there was no evidence of “vile habits”)  His symptoms included frequent to near constant headaches, disorientation, forgetfulness, dizziness, numbness, and by 1902 occasional blindness.   All of these difficulties must have made farming extremely challenging.  He was also diagnosed in 1881 with dyspepsia, which the medical records seem to tie to poor diet during the war.

In April and July of 1903, Marvin began making some changes in his property holdings, establishing his land in the names of his wife, Addie and his younger son, Fred.  In August of that year he died from a chest wound sustained when he was ran over by a grain binder.

After some difficulty, and the submission of several letters regarding the value of the farm property, his widow was able to establish her pension.  She survived him for another 17 years, passing away January 4th, 1920.

Topics I anticipate researching further:

Since his injuries had a dramatic impact on the remainder of his life, and because he sustained such a dramatic injury at such an infamous battle, I definitely want to get the details of the 1st Michigan Cavalry participation in that battle.  I also would like to look into what kind of treatments he may have received for those injuries.   And maybe some medical perspective on what he may have been experiencing as a result of the injuries.   Also need to look up dyspepsia, since I don’t really know what that is.

Also want to look into his property.  The records I have contain really specific notes about where the land was located, so if I can figure out how to decipher those exactly it would be wonderful to be able to pinpoint his farm on a map.  I would like to better understand the transfer of property rights as well.

And I want to know exactly what a grain binder is.

This week in class we discussed passwords, internet security, and backing up our online content.  Our discussion of passwords was somewhat thought provoking.  I do use the same handful of words for multiple passwords, but they are kind of random words and I misspell them different ways for different sites, so taking that into account, I think they are pretty diverse.   I did realize this week, however, that my Amazon password is the same one I have had since I opened the account in the mid-90’s.  And it’s not a very secure one.  So I need to change that.  Especially since Amazon has my credit card and home address info.  I also realized that I tend to put capital letters at the beginning and punctuation at the end, so I ought to be more mindful of that.

Discussing the archiving of internet information reminded me that it’s been a while since I backed up my LJ.  And now that that is hosted in Russia, and Russia seems increasingly unstable in news reports, I feel like I really need to keep on top of that.   Our discussion made me wonder if I ought to be doing something to archive my Facebook stuff.  Honestly, I have a hard time imagining who in the future could possibly care about my Facebook updates, but I do document a lot of the minutia of my life there.  And some of it is interesting.  But a lot of it is not.  So weeding through all that and somehow saving the interesting stuff just sounds like an enormous investment of time and effort that I am not sure I could justify.

I stand by my paper back ups though.  I’m not much of a believer in apocalyptic mania, but there is a part of me that still feels like someday (you know, when the zombie apocalypse comes) everything I’ve store online will be so easily vaporized.  Paper feels somehow more substantial, more lasting, more real.   So, while I do keep a lot of my life online, if something really matters to me, I try to have a physical copy of it somewhere.  It’s a personal neurosis, I guess.

Tackled Zotero today.  I had a bit of trouble with it at first.  I couldn’t download it in class because it is not yet available for the iPad.  Somewhat understandable, I suppose.  Back home, I first attempted to download it on Chrome, which is what I usually use.  It did give me the little icon to download a page, but when I clicked that it just thought and thought and then said it couldn’t download it.  And I could not figure out to access anything once I did get it downloaded.    The reviews seem to indicate that problems running Zotero on Chrome are pretty common.  So I jumped over to Firefox and tried it out there.  It worked like a dream.  Simple to download, super easy to use, highly useful.  I added two sources I had already identified and made notes about in a GoogleDoc (my semi-oldschool version of high tech source organization) and magically I had the whole documents, with biblio info and a nice little space for taking notes and tagging things.  The tags will be especially useful as I work through further research.

Having to operate within Firefox is a minor inconvenience, just given the way my family shares this computer, but I think adapting to a new browser, or even flopping between the two, might be worth it.  I am excited to play with the tool a bit more and plan to use it for a research project I am conducting in another class as well–the ability to store things in multiple collections is simple and handy as well.

Overall, I approve.  I wish it would have worked in Chrome, but inside of Firefox it is a great tool!

This week we began exploring online primary source material on our regiments.

Marvin Bolton served in the 1st Michigan Cavalry.  One particularly useful site for this regiment was published by the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Society.   The site can be found here and offers links to regimental histories and personal accounts published during or shortly after the war.  Two sources I found particularly interesting were the military rosters and the records of the regiment’s service.  Oddly, Bolton does not appear on any of the records contained on this site.  He is not in the list of survivors or the list of members of the “cavalry brigade society” established after the war as what appears to be a kind of club for maintaining relationships forged during the war and memorializing their experiences and their lost comrades.  I am not sure how to account for this absence, though it did send me back to double check my copies of his records which do, in fact, clearly show him serving in the 1st Michigan Cavalry.

I did find it especially interesting to read about the movements of the regiment and their participation in the war.  It appears they were quite crucial in the battle at Gettysburg, which is where Bolton was wounded.  The “Record of Service of Michigan Volunteers in the War” published in 1905, includes this account of the 1st’s participation in that battle:

The brigade was in command of General Custer in June, 1863 during the Pennsylvania campaign and in July the First was with the brigade at Gettysburg and made a saber charge upon Hampton’s brigade of confederate cavalry, one of the most desperate as well as brilliant charges of the war. The First drove a whole brigade in confusion from the field and turned what appeared to be a defeat of the Union forces into a complete victory. The regiment lost at Gettysburg 11 officers and 80 men killed, wounded or missing.

This was especially interesting to read as it was a saber wound that Bolton suffered from, which fits well with this account.

I would classify this source as “Official Records of War.”   The book was compiled by a committee appointed through an act of the Michigan legislature at the request of Michigan veterans of the Civil War.  A note in the beginning penned by Michigan Governor Bliss credits Assistant Adjutant General, Col. George H. Turner with the bulk of the work of compiling the records.

The material in this book is a part of the Public Domain, Google-digitized.

As an aside, I also quite love the recruitment poster imaged on this website, but I am having trouble identifying their source and it appears to be something protected by copyright.  The “Link Policy” on the website states “Michigan.gov is for personal and non-commercial use only.  You may not modify, copy, distribute, display, reproduce, publish, license, create derivative works from, sell, or transfer information, products, or services obtained from Michigan.gov unless the law otherwise provides or the State gives you prior written permission.”  Though, I wonder how difficult it would be to obtain written permission/more information about the source on that image.   I definitely need to look into that a little more.

This morning I tackled my first attempt at using OCR technology.  Pretty handy technology, took about two seconds to upload and transcribe a full page of text.  However, despite being mostly accurate, there were a few glaring errors.  Minor spelling problems here and there, but it also skipped a full line of text and increased the size of the “pieces of his skull knocked from his head” from 1 1/2 inches long to 155 inches long.  A pretty big discrepancy!  So the moral of the story is, OCR can be a really useful tool, but make sure you check the transcription against the original and correct for errors.

Analyses of research sources coming up in a separate post.