Welcome

Welcome! Hopefully you are here because you have an interest in participating in this collaborative digitization project to enrich the already vast scope of research materials on the American Civil War.

At the US National Archives, there are 1.28 million Civil War widows' pensions. These files are some of the richest sources for any wide array of research into the Civil War. Unlike mere service records or muster rolls, these files contain marriage certificates, baptismal records, and personal letters from soldiers and soldiers' families. Because of their huge value to the history field, this record series is being digitized through a partnership with NARA, Footnote.com, and Family Search. Now in its third year, the project that was once estimated to take 90 years is down to a 53 year prediction. Each and every file is being opened up, looked over, ordered and reordered, until it is finally photographed and posted on Footnote.com. No matter how fast the 70+ NARA volunteers can prepare the files, the project will take a very, very long time.

Those of us involved in the "CWCC" (Civil War Conservation Corps) project hold most dearly the personal letters from soldiers at the front that we find in pension files. However, due to practicality and time, resource, and metadata constrictions, there is no mechanism in place to indicate which of the (eventually) 1.28 million files contain these letters. That is where this project comes in.

Letters will only be found through individual research. This is a place for individuals to then share the letters they happen upon. We welcome you to post letters you find. Any and all readers are invited to help in transcribing the images into text, to enable ease of research. You are even invited to "tag" letters with descriptive mentions-- widow, typhoid, love letter-- anything. By "crowdsourcing" not just the digitization of the files but the analysis and interpretation for different possibilities of use, this will become a forum that will eventually enable you to search for personal letters based on things like topic, recipient, or emotion.

If you would like to get involved, please explore the site a little. The links on the left give you some instructions for posting. Thank you, and happy researching!