Week 7 | Tables and Cards

            Hello everyone, Aaron here for the seventh week of the Olustee project. The workI had this week wasn’t too bad in terms of difficulty, but again I found myself with less time than I would have liked to work on research for the internship. I had another essay to write this week (in essence functioning as a midterm) that I only completed on Thursday, so most of my work was contained to that morning and most of today so far. Next week I have an exam, but I don’t anticipate it interrupting my work too much, and luckily for me I have some new leads to follow up on.

            In our meeting today, Dr. Gannon presented to us interns the work that had been finished on the Olustee story map; the most notable revision is the now-completed “Legal” section that outlines all of the federal and state laws that could be invoked in response to the government’s mistreatment of the dead at the battlefield. She then asked us about the progress we have made in our own independent studies; I mentioned that I had not been able to find many pictures this week because of my workload but that I will continue my search now that I am done. Amusingly, one of the other interns (Jared) stumbled upon the same picture (ostensibly of the 35th USCT) that I had mentioned to Dr. Gannon at the conclusion of our meeting last week. She had passed it onto one of her colleagues, and while she didn’t explicitly say if they were able to identify it, she suggested that we might have to get into contact with the Florida State Archives (the picture’s host) to pin down its subject. At this point in the meeting, I elected to share my screen and show off the progress I made, in part because I was afraid I hadn’t been clear with what exactly I was doing for the internship. I briefly showed off the document I made where I gathered all of the 8th and 35th UCSTs sources in one place, but the main item I was able to complete yesterday was a table that groups together each soldier by the amount of sources I could find verifying or contesting their status.

            The table is too large to capture the legend, so I’ll explain its layout. Each column represents how many sources each soldier has attesting their status, and if these sources corroborate or contradict each other. Each name is preceded by a number and letter (in some cases, two) in parentheses; this represents what each source claims is the soldier’s ultimate fate. “K” refers to “killed”, “M” to “missing”, “C” to “captured”, and “O” to “other”, which in turn can refer to anything from a soldier being “discharged” to a soldier flatout being absent from the respective source’s record. The number in front of each letter indicates how many sources claim that status. So, “3K” means that three sources claim death at Olustee, and “1M1C” means one source claims the soldier is missing, and the other source claims they were captured. My intent with this table is to highlight the soldiers in which additional investigation will be the most fruitful: soldiers with 3+ sources are the most likely to have the correct status, and soldiers with conflicting sources have the largest need of a definitive answer. I hope that this can serve as a guide for Dr. Gannon’s class when the Olustee project is explained to them next week. This particular table concerns only the 8th; I am in the process of charting the 35th now that I’ve found scans of their regiment cards on Ancestry (courtesy of DR. Gannon’s instruction).