Week 4 - Cleaning Things Up

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 to diversify my skills and learn important oral history tools. In the mean time, we are to continue working on gathering all of the data and writing the biographies. 

It has been truly fascinating to sift through the reports and sources. The more I learn about these men, the more it feels like they come alive. Although much has already been uncovered about their involvement in the Battle of Olustee, the sheer scope of the task at hand highlights how astonishing it is that both this event and these individuals were overlooked in history for so long. As I write their biographies, my primary goal is to unearth and share their stories, hoping that they receive the recognition they deserve and become better known within the history of the Civil War.


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