Week 8 | Class Project Begins

  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 difficulty researching the 35th because they have less casualty information available on them. In return, I offered to start researching the 7th NHV, and I’m excited to do so because they have a regimental history book I can take a look at: a source that has compiled all of the conflicts the unit has taken part in, and most importantly—a section at the end dedicated to all of the soldiers who fought and died over the course of the regiment’s service. 

        Dr. Gannon also discussed with us how she introduced the Olustee project to her military history class. Our mission as “team leaders” is finally going to come into play. She said that she would begin assigning her students into groups based on their abilities sometime over Spring Break; for example, she will try to put students that have access to websites like Ancestry or Fold3 in each group, one per group. She also mentioned that she will try to identify students that have a certain proficiency or preference towards a step in the research project, like writing, organizing, or gathering data. During the meeting, she asked us what we thought were the best sources for each of our respective regiments; for the 8th, I mentioned that a lot of records were available via Ancestry, as well as Family Search, a website I mentioned in a blog post from a few weeks ago. I assume she asked us this so she can give the students a place to start their research, since we know them so well and could help the students if needed. Dr. Gannon also asked me to send her the table I talked about in last week's blog post; she said that it was a good way to organize the information for the students. I'm honestly quite happy that I was able to produce something of such value to the project.

        I took the time to look for some pictures of our units a bit more rigorously this week, and while it's technically not my unit anymore, I found a good picture of a soldier from the 35th back when it was first organized as the 1st North Carolina Colored Infantry. The image is hosted in the digital archives of the New York Public Library. I would copy the picture and paste it into this blog post, but seeing as ordering the original print of it costs money to acquire, I don’t think it's in the public domain. Nevertheless, having the link to the digital form is great since we can just ask the New York Public Library if we can use it for educational purposes. It's important to look at images of soldiers of the time, as it reminds you that these aren’t just names on a page; they were people, with emotions, hopes, and aspirations that died fighting for a cause they believed in. It's easy to forget that when studying history.