This week in class, we finally got the names of our soldiers as well as each individual soldier’s war-related documents. During class, the assignment was to go through each scanned document and create an inventory of what documents we were in possession of.  This entailed discerning what each document was, wether it be a CMSR, pension record, affidavit, medical examinations, etcetera, the date the document was created, and the author of the document. To catalog this information, I used a Google Docs spreadsheet, with each document in a row of its own. The task was really, really tedious, and at some points proved to be more challenging than I expected. At times it was hard to read the archaic handwriting of the 19th century doctors and clerics. The technology side, though, worked well. Having all of the data itemized on a spreadsheet  makes it much more accessible.

In addition to the inventory, we also were asked to create a second sheet on our google doc spreadsheet where we outline the vital information about our soldier. Mine, named Wilhelm (or William) Kurz was a 5’3″ German man who was 24 at age of enlistment and 62 when he died. The more I learn about Wilhelm, his young wife Phillippine, his life in New York and New Jersey, and his time in the Union Army, I am beginning to look at him as more of an individual and less as a faceless Civil War soldier. This project helps humanize history. As per our class discussion about the difference between genealogy, biography, microhistory, and taxonomy, this project definitely fits in the microhistory category; the soldiers we are studying weren’t the Generals and well-known war heroes we read about in textbooks, but each individual gives us a sense of how different each soldier’s experience was in the same army, or even in the same regiment.