For week six, I was unable to attend class. I did all of the week six readings, as well as attempted to consider each of the questions listed on the class website. Since I missed class discussion, I cannot adequately comment on that here. I can, though discuss the use of Zotero and the two secondary sources I discovered there that relate to Galthaar’s article. “Touched with Fire: The Uncommon Soldiers of the Civil War.”

One of the questions for class addressed the importance of secondary sources in constructing the life of our soldiers. The secondary literature that exists on the Civil War is important because it can give a more complete picture of a soldier’s life and can provide more generalized information that extremely focused primary documents, like medical reports and pension affidavits, do not report.

One secondary source I have now saved on Zotero is an article entitled “Soldiers of the Cross: Confederate Soldier Christians and the Impact of the War on Their Faith.” My soldier, Wilhelm Kurz, was married in a Christian church and therefore was most likely impacted spiritually by the war. This article gives me an idea of what internal struggles Kurz may have experienced due to his time served in the Confederate Army. If I had only relied on the primary sources from the Blenheim house, all I would know is the name of the church where he was married. The second document I found was from the same EBSCO database and was entitled “‘The Money Matters’ of a Confederate Soldier.” It discussed general pension laws and regulations, the pay of soldiers during the Civil War, both Confederate and Union, and how soldiers went about supporting their families during the war years and after the war. This article provided me with more of a context for Kurz’s numerous pension documents.

This week in class, we reviewed primary sources and copyright laws in relation to our soldier graffiti project. While searching for primary sources with information on the 29th Infantry, I stumbled upon a record of the infantry’s participation in battles and the corresponding casualties from the unit. The document fits under the “Official Records” from the war years category from the Valley of the Shadow database we looked at in class. The document is a kind of spread sheet, outlining each battle the infantry took part in, what date they were there, and how many men were wounded/dead/missing, separated into officers and enlisted men.  This information can help pinpoint what our individual soldiers were experienced at specific times during the war, helping us better convey their Civil War experience.

The website was created by the New York State Division of Military  and Naval Affairs for the purpose of sharing public information with online browsers interested in the civil war.  The Source is in the public domain because it is an official government record, and sources from the United States Government are not covered by copyright laws.

Another facet of research we covered was the existence of OCR, optical character recognition, which converts image files into searchable text document. This is extremely helpful in research because it makes previously painful documents searchable, making finding information infinitely more simple. Here is a JPEG file from my soldier’s records that I converted using Google’s OCR program. The mistakes were minimal, so in this case it seems to be worth the error percentage over manually typing the document. I can see these small errors adding up and creating issues, though, in longer documents that have a greater need to be precise.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xiV9pSk8J-k22ZRRCc5WKv5R11A2LTbQKaYaiRUit8c/edit

Primary source referenced in this post: http://dmna.ny.gov/historic/reghist/civil/infantry/29thInf/29thInfTable.htm