Owens HIST 390

Today, in class we further discussed how to find research on our Civil War soldier and interpret it. The subjects varied from discussing copyright laws to identifying primary sources. Both of which, I had little to no experience with beforehand so the information was quite helpful. For instance, I never knew that any information printed before 1923 cannot and does not have an up to date or valid copyright to it. This piece of information is quite beneficial to our research of our Civil War soldiers because it precedes the 1923 cutoff date.

Later in class we learned a very cool trick to better read and collect the data on our transcriptions for our soldier. Using Google it is possible, to a degree, to extract the words of a document and place them in word document like format. Since we have several transcriptions with tiny writing this practice will be quite helpful during the research process. I can now have each transcription be added to a list on my Google Drive that will contain every piece of information that is cable of this process. Now, this process is not perfect and has flaws. The translation is not always perfectly transferred correctly. For instance, on a pension form Google made the word “pension” to “pensicn.” However, I think it is acceptable and only right to expect some level of error to be made in this process by Google. All in all though, it will be very helpful in creating a profile for my soldier.

Lastly, near the end of class we met in groups that were divided by those of us who had soldiers from the same unit. So I met with three other students who also had a soldier from the 44^th Infantry from New York. Then, as a group, we researched for all of the websites and information on our unit that we could and compiled a list on a shared Google Drive. We learned some interesting things like the battles that were fought by our Unit. Also, the most interesting thing I found was that our unit actually has a memorial at one site. Things are progressing well and I can’t wait to learn more about Amos Phillips and the 44^th Infantry from New York.