Some days you’re looking at them, it’s just a file. But then another day you find
a soldier who left nine children at home and went off to war. This happened to be the first
file I opened this morning and you never know what to expect. All of a sudden there popped
out in the file this wonderful tintype! Here’s a letter from a private who survived Andersonville
but reports on a private who died there. We right now are located in just one of the stacks
of the Civil War Widows’ Pension Application files. There are a total of 1.28 million case
files and so it occupies a good 2 ½ floors here at the National Archives in Washington,
DC. The digitization project is the first time that we’re reformatting the paper to
digital images for access on line. The processing of the records is really a multi-step process.
So the volunteers have a lot of things to think about as they approach each file. And
this is one that has been glued in many places. So there’s no way to open this document.
So what we do then is take a tag and flag it and then just make sure it gets to the
conservationists. The documents were originally tri-folded and put inside these wrappers.
And the wrapper is something we always have to check because people have found documents
inside there. The document is in pieces. It will then go to conservation. And they will
repair it before they send it to the photographers. It just ensures that the bits stay together
in one piece. And the pink alert alerts Earl. When we find records that have paper clips
in them we’re instructed to take them out. But we have to be careful because if we just
took it out we’d rip the paper. So we use a piece of plastic, slip it under the paper
clip and very gently we make it come out. This is a typical box in the Widow Certificate
Series, which houses within it 25 to 35, on average, case files. Each case file has its
own envelope. And it can go anywhere from 10 pages up to several hundred pages. Target
sheets that we create are used to, for the indexing. We’re looking at 19th-century
handwriting. Double S’s look like a P and an S. The S’s and the L’s look alike.
We just try to make sure that we agree on what those letters really are. In O’Sullivan,
do we put the apostrophe? Yeah, right. Sometimes when a volunteer opens a case file a face
peers back at them. Sometimes it’s a soldier in full uniform. Sometimes it’s the wife
herself. Occasionally we find a document that reflects the work of a clerk in the pension
office. “These papers, having been sorted with considerable care are now fastened together
in the hope that the next man may escape the annoyance and drudgery that would be entailed
were they chucked back in the promiscuous condition in which they were found.” I apparently
was the next man! This is a mother’s pension file based on the service of a soldier named
Timothy O’Meara. O’Meara was an officer. He was a close friend of General Grant’s.
The chaplain writes, “When O’Meara’s body was brought from where he died, on its
way General Grant ordered the coffin to be opened that he might look upon the face of
the gallant hero.” We’re processing approximately 25 to 30,000 case files each year. And the
volunteers log more than 700 hours each month. Without their work, truly the National Archives
would never have the resources to approach a project that is this large and vast. For
a Civil War buff it’s like the kid in the candy store. I wanted to give back, because
I have found records on line and I know somebody worked to put them on line. The career path
that I want to follow is not necessarily in teaching, it’s doing stuff like this, working
on projects for public access. My great-great-grandfather served in the Civil War as did my wife’s
great-great-grandfather. Both units fought in the same battle, at Gettysburg. Mine served
on the Union side and hers served on the Confederate side. We’ve not yet gotten to his pension
yet, but we will. Though we have 1.28 million case files in the series and likely none of
the current volunteers will be here when we reach the end, I’d like to think that we
have to just start somewhere. “We both reached Andersonville Prison, July 9th ’64. Benjamin
was healthy and well at first, but about the middle of August following, large scurvy sores
came on his left leg making him quite lame. Benjamin F. Jenks died of the above-mentioned
diseases, he being in the adjoining bunk to me.” You run across something like this
and it gets to you. That’s why we do this stuff.