Home again
Sir Walter Scott wrote a poem many years ago that describes well how most people feel after any kind of travelling:
Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand!1
That’s pretty much the feeling here around The Legal Genealogist this morning — home after a week of intensive immersive genealogy at the Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama.
Home! Home to your own bed, your own routines, your own family and pets. (My cats haven’t been more than two feet away from me since I walked through the door late last night.) Home to your own desktop computer which runs about 10 times faster than the netbook used for travel and your own internet connection that doesn’t demand a username and password every single time you want to use it. Home, in my case, to the prescription medicine I left behind when I packed last week.2 Home.
And home to begin using all of those wonderful resources you learn about in a week-long institute format. I’ve written about some of the key ones over the past week. But here are just a few more that I’ll be looking at:
• To learn about the Freedmen’s Bureau:
Freedmen’s Bureau Records – An Overview3
The Freedmen’s Bureau, 1865-18724
• To learn more about slavery in the North:
Slavery in the North,5 a website with individual pages and resources for the 13 northern states.
• To learn more about official Civil War records:
Access the War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies in transcribed form from Ohio State University.6
Access the actual scanned images of War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies from Cornell University.7
Access the actual scanned images of War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in PDF format from Cornell.8
Access the actual scanned images of The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion from Internet Archive.9
• To learn more about Civil War era records:
Civil War Washington,10 a site with all kinds of information from maps to photographs to historical documents and manuscripts.
But home, as well, and perhaps most of all, to cherish the old friends visited and new friends made during a week with kindred souls:
Participants and Faculty, Course 8 - IGHR 2012
SOURCES
- Sir Walter Scott, Canto Sixth, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 8th ed. (Edinburgh: James Ballantyne & Co., 1808); digital images, Google Books (http://books.google.com : accessed 16 Jun 2012). ↩
- Thanks to Kimberly Powell, who takes the same dosage of the same medicine, and probably kept me alive — or at least awake — the latter part of the week! ↩
- Elaine C. Everly, “Freedmen’s Bureau Records – An Overview,” Special Issue: Federal Records and African American History Prologue, Summer 1997, Vol. 29, No. 2, online (http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue : accessed 16 Jun 2012). ↩
- NARA, African American Heritage: The Freedmen’s Bureau, 1865-1872 (http://www.archives.gov : accessed 16 Jun 2012). ↩
- Douglas Harper, Slavery in the North (http://www.slavenorth.com/ : accessed 16 Jun 2012). ↩
- “War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies,” Ehistory, Ohio State University (http://ehistory.osu.edu : accessed 16 Jun 2012). ↩
- “War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies,” Making of America, Cornell University (http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/m/moa/ : accessed 16 Jun 2012). ↩
- War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies, Making of America, Cornell University (http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/m/moa/ : accessed 16 Jun 2012). ↩
- Here’s the search return page at Internet Archive for this multi-volume set. Internet Archive (http://archive.org : accessed 16 Jun 2012). ↩
- Susan C. Lawrence, Kenneth M. Price, and Kenneth J. Winkle, eds., Civil War Washington, University of Nebraska-Lincoln (http://civilwardc.org/ : accessed 16 Jun 2012). ↩
Great post. Love how you are in the center of the pic. LOL But, seriously, really enjoyed having dinner with you and getting to know you better. It is exciting to network and find other’s strengths so you can learn from them. Visiting your website has a whole new meaning, now that we have met! I am definitely going to go back and read those Sunday articles (others too of course!). I am like you, taking the day to do some catch up and then get started using those things we learned this past week.
Enjoyed meeting you as well, Tina!
I love how you’re in the middle, too! I was so happy to meet you, finally!!
What’s funny about this is that I just happened to be in the middle because it was the one spot that was open after showing our volunteer button pusher how to operate my camera! Sure as heck wasn’t planned — my usual spot in pictures is behind the camera, not in front of the lens! Good to meet you in person, at last, Polly!
While we didn’t get to meet – I wanted to comment, great week but happy to be in my own bed, I got home at 11AM this morning and my cats haven’t left my side either!
I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to meet! Maybe next time… and ya gotta love those furballs.
Serious case of education-envy!! One day… In the meantime, I’ve garnered some great tips and ideas, and definitely enjoyed your posts from Birmingham, Judy. Always a pleasure.