Author: Damian Shiels
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Crew Correspondence: The Last Letter of Paymaster’s Steward Thomas Brown
One of the central aims of the Civil War Bluejackets Project is to facilitate the “linking” of Civil War sailor’s data across different record types. Perhaps the richest of all of those records are the pension files of naval dependents. They were claimed when a serving or pensioned sailor passed away. Within files relating to…
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Civil War Bluejackets Features in Special Issue of Crossfire
The Civil War Bluejackets team recently received an invitation from the American Civil War Roundtable UK to guest edit a special edition of their magazine, Crossfire. The main theme of the issue was the Irish experience of the conflict, but we took the opportunity to highlight the Bluejackets project through both the introduction and in…
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Sheets from the Fleet: USS Argosy
“Sheets from the Fleet” is a new occasional series we will be running to highlight some of the Muster Sheets we are working on and the potential we are hoping to unlock with the Civil War Bluejackets Project. Each post/thread will see us pick a random muster sheet from a random U.S. vessel and explore…
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Memorial Day Stories 4: Robert Harwood, USS Tecumseh
For Memorial Day 2022 Civil War Bluejackets took to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to share the stories of some of the men who lost their lives aboard USS Tecumseh at the Battle of Mobile Bay, Alabama in 1864. Covering the vessel and four of her crew, the stories were presented as threads, and are replicated on the blog for…
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Memorial Day Stories 3: William Churchill, USS Tecumseh
For Memorial Day 2022 Civil War Bluejackets took to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to share the stories of some of the men who lost their lives aboard USS Tecumseh at the Battle of Mobile Bay, Alabama in 1864. Covering the vessel and four of her crew, the stories were presented as threads, and are replicated on the blog for…
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Memorial Day Stories 2: George Chapman, USS Tecumseh
For Memorial Day 2022 Civil War Bluejackets took to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to share the stories of some of the men who lost their lives aboard USS Tecumseh at the Battle of Mobile Bay, Alabama in 1864. Covering the vessel and four of her crew, the stories were presented as threads, and are replicated on the blog for…
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Memorial Day Stories 1: USS Tecumseh
For Memorial Day 2022 Civil War Bluejackets took to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to share the stories of some of the men who lost their lives aboard USS Tecumseh at the Battle of Mobile Bay, Alabama in 1864. Covering the vessel and four of her crew, the stories were presented as threads, and are replicated…
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Infographic: Exploring the Origins, Ethnicity & Makeup of an American Civil War Ship’s Crew
Where were the men who served aboard U.S. naval vessels from the American Civil War born? What proportions of their crew were African American, and how many were immigrants? The answers to these questions varied from ship to ship, but could have a profound impact on how the vessel’s on-board community functioned. In our new…
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Revealing the Life Experiences of African American Crewmen aboard USS Pittsburg, July 1864
In order to examine the potential of linking data to specific crew lists, a sample analysis was undertaken on crewmen from the USS Pittsburg muster of 1 July 1864. This muster included details on 151 individuals, 40 percent of whom were black. Pension applications were sought relating to black and immigrant sailors among the crew, with thirty…
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USS Carondelet Spotlight: Nativity & Ethnicity on a Union Gunboat
In our first two posts on Civil War Bluejackets we focused on individuals, exploring what they can reveal about immigrant and African American service in the Union Navy. Another of our aims with the muster roll transcription project is to see what the wider data set can tell us, and what questions it might raise. One way…
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