Week 3 - Getting to Work

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 existing information on the men that was already gathered by previous interns. Some men have already been marked as definitively killed based on military service records, while most are recorded as likely missing. Dr. Gannon's question then is: based on available sources, were they likely left behind? This is the key question I will be answering as I continue to work. 

To accompany this question, Dr. Gannon has also assigned us the task of writing paragraph-long biographies on the soldiers, summarizing what we know, and citing the sources that tell us this information. 

As I have been working, I have had some trouble navigating the Google Drive and determining which names have already been looked at and accounted for - there are quite a few duplicate documents, so it is hard to see which one is the most updated. I plan to clarify this in the next meeting to ensure I am doing everything right! 

However, I have enjoyed this task so far, getting a glimpse into the lives of the Union soldiers' stories and the determination of their status behind the evidence left behind. 

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