Week 10 | Regimental History

        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 actually did have a record listed in the regimental history; I can only theorize that the authors of the Union Roll of Honor (the source of the spreadsheet) may not have had full access to records such as the one in the 7th’s regimental history, although I cannot fathom why or how. Nonetheless, the 7th NHV regimental history has proven to be the most reliable source, and while I will corroborate it with other information, I feel pretty confident in naming this as the most important source for Dr. Gannon’s students when they start research (more on that in a bit). As such, I’ve been looking at the abbreviations the regimental history’s author uses to describe the soldiers, since many of them are not apparent and I felt that students might eventually come to ask me about what they could mean. Some of them are fairly straightforward: “mis.” means “missing”, “wd.” means “wounded”; others are more uncommon and thus harder to guess: “exch.” means a prisoner exchange, and “par” means a parole. Finally, there are the complex abbreviations: “n. f. r .A. G. O.” refers to a soldier with no further record, as approved by the Adjutant General’s Office (high ranking Army office). I went over some of these abbreviations with Dr. Gannon, and there was only one we weren’t able to ascertain: “gd. from mis.”. My first instinct was “gained from missing”, but that doesn’t immediately make any sense. She said she’d consult someone else on the matter.

        As for the students starting their research, Dr. Gannon said that she hadn’t got the chance to sort them into groups just yet. She was waiting for them to finish a survey expressing their interests in different parts of the research process, such as writing or creating spreadsheets. Her plan of dividing out students according to their access to websites like Ancestry has also been complicated, as she realized she will have to take into consideration her students’ access to school (because of COVID protocols and such). She expects that she will finish the groups over the weekend, and by then I imagine she will call us interns in to introduce ourselves to the students and begin overseeing their research.