behind AotW

An excellent companion to Moore's Roster for researching North Carolina troops is the 5 Volume Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina in the Great War, 1861-1865, published by the State of North Carolina in 1901. Editor Walter Clark was Adjutant of the 35th Regiment at Sharpsburg, and later Lieutenant Colonel of the 70th Regiment.

All NC military units - along with an array of related subjects - are represented in one or more articles, and each piece is written by a veteran who served in the regiment, battalion, or battery. Their works range from brief essays to fairly sophisticated unit histories. As a bonus, most include selections of war-period photographs of officers and men. There are hundreds of faces altogether across the volumes.

These volumes are available online from both GoogleBooks and the Internet Archive (IA) Collection. I like the IA image quality and paging interface best, so a hyperlinked table of contents (hyperTOC) for that online edition follows ...

I've been on a fruitful run over the last couple of weeks looking into North Carolina soldiers who were at the battle of Sharpsburg. It began with the following haunting photograph from the Time-Life Voices volume on the battle of Fredericksburg ...

W.B. Whitaker (Time-Life's Voices: Fredericksburg, courtesy Frances Honeycutt)

He's First Sergeant - later Captain - William Benjamin Whitaker of Henderson County, North Carolina. Last week saw the anniversary of his death at Fredericksburg, Virginia in 1862. He'd enlisted in Company I of the 16th Infantry in May 1861 and was promoted Captain in April 1862.

Looking into him, I found two extensive works online about North Carolina State Troops in the War. I'll assemble hyperlinked tables of contents (hyperTOCs) for each to save a little time on future research.

First - in this post - an old standby reference work: Moore's Roster. Next time, Walter Clark's Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions...

Bad news and good news. The bad news is that the famed website cwartillery.org is no more. The good news is that the core information - if not the lively, efficient design - is still available online.

header, The Civil War Artillery Page, 1999 (C. Ten Brink)

Unfortunately, original author Chuck Ten Brink can no longer maintain the site, but he has passed the material to the care of the Robinson Artillery. It begins on their Civil War Artillery page.

Chuck first put his work on the subject on the Web in 1996, and has been thereafter the go-to guy for many of us on terminology, equipment details, guns and artillerists, and (in partnership with Wayne Stark) the Civil War Artillery Encyclopedia and the National Register of Surviving Civil War Artillery (sample: Antietam's page c. 1998).

I'll very much miss the old site, but say Hurrah, Chuck, for your long online service!

Frederick Phisterer's New York in the War of the Rebellion (3rd Edition, 6 volumes, Albany: J. B. Lyon Company, 1909-12) is probably the single best resource on New York military units and officers in the Civil War. It is two other things also, which are exciting to the likes of me: it's beautifully displayed online by the Internet Archives (IA) folks, and is in the Public Domain - free of any copyright restrictions.

New York in the War comes neatly packaged in 5 volumes and an index. IA offers 4 versions of each volume:

• Read Online - a flip book display of all the page images. Very high image quality, and relatively fast loads (at least with my broadband connection). You can move about in the book here as you would in its paper cousin: click on the right page to turn ahead, the left to go back. You can also jump to a page by number or by link(s) in a set of search results.
• PDF - a view of the page images in an Adobe Acrobat file. This downloads to your desktop, and can take a while at 50MB or more per volume. The interface is the usual one for a pdf - and depends on your reader/browser combination.
• Full text - a somewhat jumbled simple text file of the entire volume displayed in your browser window, all in one pile. Searchable using your browser's "Find" tool, but can be hard to use. Looks like an uncorrected product of OCR after scanning. It is probably the version used to support text searching in the flip-book display. If he text is mangled here, it doesn't search well there. If you want to copy native text for use elsewhere, you'll do that from this text view.
• DjVu - a cool viewer technology from Lizardtech which runs as an applet in your browser. Gorgeous high-resolution images of each page and a pretty viewer, but at the cost of large file sizes. This can mean very slow loading and paging. I haven't used this much, so I expect there's more here than meets the eye.

Plus a file transfer (ftp) repository for all versions and files, so you can grab a copy of any of their files for each volume.

My favorite version for reading online has been the two-page-at-a-time "flip book" view, but I thought it might be easier to navigate across the volumes if it had a hyperlinked table of contents (hyperTOC!). So I wrote a rudimentary one ...

The Bombardment of Fort Sumter (by Alexander Oscar Levy, from Phisterer, Vol. 1, opposite pg. 316)