Civil War Years--
Project Status Report

Welcome! You have just entered Part II of the Valley of the Shadow Project: The War Years. This part of the project will cover the Civil War years in Augusta Co. and Franklin Co. and follow their soldiers out onto the battle fields. We are currently researching and working on Part II, so what you see is a research project in progress. This window will report the status of each part of the Valley project Civil War archive to give you an exact account of how close to completion we are in each area.

Date: January 2001

Newspapers:

We have tagged in sgml five Augusta and Franklin County newspapers in publication during the Civil War. They are fully searchable. Images of the newspaper pages are available for most of these papers. The image files are in PDF format and require the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view.

We have made full-text transcriptions of thousands of selected articles from these newspapers, and these are found in our Newspaper Transcriptions section. These transcriptions are organized by date and topic.

Military Dossiers:

After many trips to the National Archives, we have entered into the dossier database the compiled military service records of thousands of soldiers from Franklin County, PA, and Augusta County, VA. We have completed almost all of the Augusta research, with the direction of Col. Robert L. Driver, Jr., (USMC Ret.). We are finalizing and double-checking our records for some sol diers from Franklin County who fought in a wide variety of units. All told we have records on 7,477 Franklin soldiers and 6,053 soldiers from Augusta County. We are currently working on detailed analysis of these soldiers records and plan to put online SPSS files, as well as charts and graphs of our findings.

Battle Field Maps:

We have developed a series of animated maps showing troop movements of Franklin and Augusta units in the Eastern Theater of the war. Note: Requires the free Macromedia Shockwave plug-in.

We are also working on three dimensional maps of the battlefields where Augusta and Franklin men fought. As soon as we have samples of this work, we will make them available to you on the Web.

Official Records:

We have compiled the reports filed by officers of Franklin and Augusta units after every major engagement they fought in. These were taken from the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, using with permission the Broadfoot Army Official Records CD-ROM. These reports are organized by battle and regiment and have been marked up in SGML for encoding and searching.

Letters and Diaries

Nearly all of our Civil War letters and diaries have been tagged in sgml and can be searched by author, keyword, or phrase. We have hundreds of letters available but still have several hundred to compile, edit, proof, and tag in SGML. We will, for example, have online a letters collection found in the National Archives Pension files of a black Franklin soldier who fought in the 54th Massachusetts. Many other letters are in process and will be available in the coming months.

Geographic Information Systems

We have built a georeferenced edition of the 1870 Jedediah Hotchkiss map of Augusta County. We are currently working on the data and georeferencing of an 1858 Franklin County map. Each map details the households in the county and our effort is directed at a household and institution level GIS of each county. We expect to deliver these maps as Arc Internet Map Server projects and allow visitors to have full capability to query the maps.