Summer 23 Internship - Olustee Project

This week, my primary focus was again on completing the final determinations for the 35th USCT and conducting research on the unidentified individuals among them. I still have not found any information on the men in the repositories I have used (Ancestry and National Archives), but I will reach out to my team for some guidance on other repositories to look in. On Tuesday, our team gathered for a meeting led by Dr. Gannon. She shared her experiences working with the VLP (Veterans Legacy Program) Institute and expressed her vision for the Olustee project going forward. It was an insightful discussion that shed light on the project's future direction in bringing these men's stories to light; in the upcoming week, each team member will have an individual meeting with Dr. Gannon to provide a comprehensive progress update and receive further guidance on our next steps. Looking ahead, a VLP Story Day is scheduled for next Friday, July 7th. During this event, we were asked if we would ...

In continuing to work on the task I have been assigned over the past few weeks, I am pleased to share that I am nearing completion of the biographies for the individuals assigned to me. It has been an engaging journey to delve into the lives of these remarkable men - however, there are still a few outstanding cases where I have encountered limited available data in the Google Drive. To gather sources and work on their biographies, I have expanded my research efforts to include additional repositories such as Ancestry and the National Archives. Exploring these extensive databases has proven to be an invaluable resource, providing me with a deeper understanding of the lives and experiences of these veterans. It has also allowed me to verify certain details and make the necessary final determinations for those individuals with insufficient information in the Google Drive; further adding to my historical toolkit, in terms of individual research. During our team meeting this week, the upcom...

This week, Brett and I made further progress on the task assigned to us over the past few weeks, which involved cleaning up the Google Sheet and verifying the final determinations for the men of the 8th and 35th USCT who were present at the Battle of Olustee. I have pretty much completed my Google Sheet for the 35th USCT and have now turned my attention to writing biographies for the men who do not have one - to do this, I utilized the template provided by Dr. Gannon and the sources compiled by former interns. Out of the 21 men in need of a biography, I have already written four. Delving into the lives of these men, primarily through military muster and death certificates, has been a somewhat somber experience. It can be challenging to truly grasp who these individuals were when all you have are records indicating whether they were deceased or still alive, particularly in terms of their presence at the Olustee Battleground. Nevertheless, it is crucial knowledge that helps to bring thei...

This week I continued delving into the task Dr. Gannon assigned last week - establishing final dead/missing/survived determinations of the men from the 35th USCT regiment. To do this, fellow intern Brett Nystrom and I utilized a template created by previous interns to reorganize and compile all the applicable data into one Google Sheet. This will help mitigate the problems of the various duplicated sheets and unfinished reports within the drive. Screenshot of Research Sheet We also verified which men had short 1-paragraph biographies written about them, as it was a task assigned to previous interns, and linked them within the new document. Now that we have established this and begun compiling the available sources, we can continue writing biographies for the men who do not have bios. During the weekly meeting on Tuesday, we were also told we will be given some processing tasks to do in our downtime, just in case we want to change up our jobs - I am excited for this, as it will allow me...

This week, we again met as a team on Tuesday to discuss our current progress. Dr. Gannon touched on her aspirations for the project, the main one being bringing public attention to the men left behind at the Olustee site, while other interns touched on their progress processing interviews and AV logs, reaching out to the community, and organizing the Google Drive used to house the project data.  Dr. Gannon then gave me a specific task to work on - researching the men of the 8th and 35th USCT regiments to determine if they were killed in battle or recorded as MIA, all in the goal of creating a finalized list of the Union soldiers who were left behind at the Olustee site and therefore likely to be buried in the mass grave located on or near the battleground.  To begin this task, I split the regiments with a fellow Olustee intern, Brett Nystrom, taking on the 35th regiment. With these men's names, I have been using the search feature in the shared Google Drive to locate any exist...