Battle of Olustee Project | Aaron Connors

          Hello all, Aaron here for another week of the Olustee internship. This week was relatively straightforward in terms of work, and even the meeting we had today wasn’t very long. Now that us interns have handed off the burden of Olustee research to Dr. Gannon’s students, we will have less investigating to do ourselves. As such, I actually don’t know what we will be tasked with next week.           This week, Dr. Gannon instructed us to create guidelines for the research her students would be conducting. This week, she split them into groups based on their stated proficiencies, such as organizing sources in proper formatting, or directing research efforts. She also split the groups by how many sources were available for each of their respective regiments. The 8th USCT became one of the biggest groups, since this week we found all of their CMSRs (compiled military service records) on the National Archives’ website, which ...

          Hello everyone, Aaron here for the tenth week of the Olustee project. Spring Break was a welcome reprieve from stressful university work, and a good time to hang out with my friends, but now is the time to get back to research for the internship and studying for my other four courses. For whatever reason, work for my other classes was relatively light this week, although I do have a project coming up in one of my upper level courses.            I spent the extra time diving into the regimental history of the 7th New Hampshire Volunteers that I first mentioned in my week 8 blog post. The source is incredibly thorough; not only does it mention the fate of any particular soldier at Olustee, but it also details when they were mustered in and out, and if captured, if they had ever been released in a prisoner exchange or paroled. Many of the soldiers that had “no further record” detailed in the original spreadsheet act...

  Hello, Aaron here for yet another week of the Olustee Project. Today was a light week for my other classes, owing to the fact Spring Break is next week, although I did have an exam in one of my classes yesterday (on the bright side, it was online so I didn’t need to drive to the main campus). As such, I had more time to work on research for the internship, which I made use of. Although, I should mention that the scope of my research has changed a little after this week’s meeting—let me explain.           To sum it up simply, I am no longer working with the 35th USCT, my fellow intern Jared is, and I have taken on research of the 7th New Hampshire Volunteers. This is because Jared had started research on the 35th under the misconception that was one of his assigned regiments. Dr. Gannon asked if I wanted to let him take over research on the 35th, and since I believed he had a better grasp on the unit than me, I accepted. I’ve consistently had diffic...