Oh. my. goodness. Trying to take in everything at NIGR is
like trying to drink from a firehose. Our first speaker on Tuesday morning
explained that her one-hour lecture would be a condensation of a four-hour
presentation. And then she was off and running, talking rapidly as
we tried to keep up. This was followed
by another one-hour presentation by the same speaker. Followed by more
speakers, each attempting to distill years’ and
years’ worth of experience into a useful package to enable us to
navigate the 500+ record groups in the National Archives system. This is key: the National Archives does not
rearrange or combine the records that come to them. So, service records for a
Civil War soldier are in one record group, his pension application in another,
his medical records (if he ended up in a hospital due to wounds or illness) in
another, and I refuse to even think about bounty land right now. Anyway, we need to know that all these sets of
papers are in different places and need to be requested separately. Notations on papers in one set might well
refer you to another set of papers… if you know how to interpret these things. Hence the firehose of information.
I’m beginning to feel less ignorant about military records—as
in, I’m getting an idea of what I don’t know, which is the important first
step. We have lectures on basic military records, Civil War medical records,
pension records, discharge papers for the War of 1812, and Fold3’s military
collections. Much of my own personal research time will be in the Civil War
military and pension files of two or three men, supplemented (I hope) with some
regimental histories.
We had the DAR Library to ourselves for three hours last
night with the undivided attention of four staff members; quite a treat! I
found a North Carolina county history that I’d not come across before. And then I found that the classmate sitting
across the table from me was reading up on the same religious community in the
same North Carolina county. Gotta love the
connections we make with other researchers attending NIGR! The DAR Library, by
the way, is an amazingly beautiful space. I remember years and years ago when
my family was taking the train cross-country and we changed in Chicago, our
parents took us out on the street and we craned our necks at the skyscrapers,
and Dad laughed at us little hicks awed by the city. Well, some things never
change; decades after leaving farm country, I’m still awed by these things that
we never saw amidst the forty acres of this and forty acres of that in rural
Michigan. And so at the DAR Library I grinned to myself like a hick in the
city, soaking up the beauty of the place.
