In 2020, Northumbria University undertook a pilot project to explore the lives of ordinary immigrant and African American sailors during the American Civil War, and which has informed our current project. As with the Civil War Bluejackets Project, the mainstay of the pilot was a crowd-sourced analysis of newly digitised muster rolls of Union naval vessels from the conflict housed at the U.S. National Archives in Washington D.C. This page archives some of the information from that Pilot, such as the details of the ships we focused on, the volunteers who took part, and the methodology we employed. You can also find some of the posts we created during the Pilot by looking back through our Blog Post section.

The Gunboats

The Volunteers

The Methodology