Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 2001 | Volume 52, Issue 5
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 2001 | Volume 52, Issue 5
Family legend had it that your great-great-great-uncle Hiram Spooner, a Massachusetts farmer, died from wounds suffered at Cold Harbor, Virginia. How can you retrace his short life? You might pick through the Massachusetts state archives and slowly assemble a narrative from a patchwork of published induction rosters, military-service diaries, and death certificates, but your search might suffer from spotty record keeping. Some battle details, for instance, might be buried in federal archives. Or perhaps your uncle, his name affixed a trailing “e” by an erring clerk, might seem to have evaporated from history entirely.
We know of virtually every meal and motive of the generals, but histories of the Civil War’s four million enlisted men generally remain buried in the historical record, dug up only with the utmost patience by descendants and scholars. Who can find all such stories? The job has been taken on by Richard Dobbins, a restless 56-year-old with no formal training in history.
Working from a former transmission repair shop in Kingston, Massachusetts, Dobbins and his three employees are creating the Civil War Research Database, a tool that may reshape how we understand the war. The concept is at once simple and breathtaking. Since 1993 Dobbins has entered into a sophisticated computer database, by hand, millions of personnel records from some 170 different sources. They detail induction dates, promotions, combat service, discharge status, causes of death, and more. For 135 years, these bits of information were widely scattered in printed regimental histories and handscrawled documents issued by an assortment of state agencies and veterans groups. Gathered into a central database, the disparate shards of data can be organized into unified collections that can be analyzed and linked at will.
You may now be able to learn instantly, for example, exactly when Uncle Hiram died; you may be able to inspect a doctor’s notes on his wounds. Getting such basic information by twentieth-century methods would have required a page-by-page inspection of Massachusetts regimental histories and muster rolls. Now you need only log onto www.civilwardata.com, and for $25.00 a year, you can access a 4.2-gigabyte database pumping information through industrial-strength software normally employed by insurers and airlines.
“I used to have to go through reels and reels of microfiche to identify enlisted men,” says one user. “Now it takes minutes, and I do it out of my house.” Dobbins’s creation is about far more than convenience though. It engenders a still unexploited ability to turn raw information into broader insights about the war’s demographics, especially by using its “regimental casualty analysis,” a tabular day-by-day accounting of who in a given regiment was killed or wounded.
Take the real Hiram Spooner’s 27th Massachusetts Infantry, for instance. He was one of just five men killed on June 2, 1864, but the regiment would suffer another 16 deaths over the following two days. The database can sort the carnage by place of enlistment, and a few more mouse clicks produce a page