The Civil War 1861-1865 Project

Anita,

I've moved all the VA units down under the Army of Northern VA - and then each Regiment has its Companies under it...

I took the liberty of removing them from the higher level Civil War Project...

I definitely think that might make for an easier hierarchy to navigate...

Its pretty easy to add or remove related projects - you guys can eyeball it and see if its an improvement or not...

d

Anita, et al

In other words - because I realized I didn't really explain myself too well in previous post - putting the units under the Army - or having them under the Battle - or - whatever other hierarchy - you see the higher level things - and then kind of descend into the unit details...

Each of the Companies only has the Regiment as its related project - so its pretty easy to work your way back up the tree... That way nobody has to drown in the details at the higher levels... This works too if you had States tied to the highest level - you can put Armies or Battles under them and work it the same way... I'm using a naming convention of appending "Civil War Project" to all the units - just because I kind of wanted to make my stuff as "reusable" as possible for any other projects that might want to incorporate them...

I'm flexible - I'm going to keep throwing my respective ancestors into the Regiments/Companies - and if need be they can be isolated/insulated/separated off from any of the other projects - but since they are Civil War profiles - I just wanted to somehow associate with this larger effort...

Much past that - I don't have any strong feelings one way or the other...

The folks in the profile will happily follow Marse Robert anywhere...

d

Lizzie...

I am tackling this in this way, and I think Donald is as well....I am creating projects for what MY ancestors need...units, battles, etc. Then when I have all created for my people, then I will go back and flesh out other profiles, search for commands in my units, etc.

Douglas is using a different approach...he is working on command staff, mainly CSA right now, and getting those profiles identified. Becuase of the work he has done, as I have worked on some "Army of" and Battle projects, I am easily finding his profiles, so I can attach them as needed (he is putting hte CSA/USA in the display name on 99%).

Michael's form of attack is to build up a Battle as much as possible, adding in profiles as he finds them (check out his Gettysburg project...it is a work of art!).

If we all use our particular skills or approaches, we eventually will get there. That said...choose your style, work on it your way, and eventually you will find a collaborator. Someone is out there who also has Mississippi ancestors in your units, and they will tackle their people and find new research tools (be sure to share in the research discussions), and so on, and eventually the projects will be complete.

The hope is that if we can get the vast majority of the battles done, as well as most of the units (by done I simply mean created with a short overview), as other users are made aware of the projects, they will add in their own ancestors profiles, and eventually they will all be nice full projects.

Lizzie...your Mississippi projects are AWESOME!!! Great detail!!!

I only ask, as you create more, be sure to put "US Civil War" as part of the name....many of these units fought in other battles that we are not addressing here. (You can't change what you have already done, so don't worry about them...I have a couple I would prefer to name differently, but Geni isn't set up that way yet.)

Anita,

I will go with the approach of continuing to add my ancestors to the projects already available (like the "other people in the civil war" and Gettysburg" projects). When I can't find a project for their Regiment I'll go ahead and start one (like I did with the 19th and 26th MS Infantry CSA projects). I've done a lot of research on the 19th and the 26th MS Infantry because several of my ancestors were in those regiments but I'm happy to have anybody else join and share in the project. :)

Thanks Anita! :)

Donald...I like that you tied the Units to the Battles...but not all VA units might have been in the Army of Northern Virginia, and someone looking, for instance, for a Maryland unit, might not know to look under that Army, especially if they are not Civil War enthusiasts.

I am leaning more and more toward State projects as well as the Armies, etc. I want someone searching for "Alabama" and "Civil War" to find the state project as well as any Armies and units. Plus, as you stated, the hierarchy is easier to manage and explore that way.

I am going to make an executive decision....

Let's use Donald's plan of tying a company to a regiment, a regiment to a division, a division to an Army....but also tie each of the state and below level units to a State, and all to the appropriate battles, by company if necessary.

Michael or Donald...will one of you write up a blurb for the main page that shows the hierarchies? I am guessing Confederate setups will be different than Union....right???? I am a Civil War buff, but not so much the military side..the personal stories intrigue me much more, which is why I was pushing for the personal profile to be tied to all projects...that is just going to be too cumbersome.

All...will you, when you get time, please not only move your projects to the appropriate hierarchical project, but also tweak the intro paragraph to indicate something along the lines of "the 2nd Michigan Cavalry was assigned to both the Army of the Cumberland (later to become the Army of the Ohio) and to the Army of the Mississippi" as you find the info.

I will quickly set up State projects for the units we have started...and write new guidelines for the units, brigades, etc, as well as the states.

Ok...what about battles? Group them by year?

Anita, et al,

At this point all I've really got in place so far for my ancestors are Regiment/Company... I can throw all of what I've got generically under Virginia - and anybody that needs them can muster them into appropriate armies, campaigns, or whatever by just relating the Regiment level project to whatever they are doing... In fact - I'm okay with throwing them into some kind of placeholder project for the time being if that works until the rest of the infrastructure is ready just to minimize the clutter of what I'm doing so it doesn't get in anybody's way for now...

Like I say - I'm flexible... For what I'm doing - kind of wading through National Archive Records for all of the various civil war ancestors - Regiment and Company kind of fall into place... In the CSA - most of the Companies were all recruited from a given area - town, surrounding counties,etc... So - I tend to get groups of ancestors in a given company - or that's mostly how I'm finding them doing the research...

If we did it by state - we could probably group most of them based on that scheme as well... County or town of origin...

I think the whole "related project" is probably robust enough to work as kind of a cross index on any of these schemes...

I'm probably not the best guy to come up with the overall hierarchy for the campaigns or armies - but I think what I'm doing is probably the most meaningful way to do it at the low level with the Regiment/Company thing... I'll happily defer to Michael on what would make sense from the top down...

Thanks Donald...I only have two ancestors (so far), both from Michigan but one infantry and one cavalry, so I am not doing groups as you are.

I put updates on the main page...move, group, store as you need to as you are working on items....we don't need perfection right now, as long as someone new to the project is able to find what they are looking for.

I also listed out the states, and the years for battles (another executive decision)...and will do links as items come up.

Excellent... Throw one out for VA and I'll park all my folks there until they are needed elsewhere...

VA is done!!!! Love the flags you found!

I've added two different Missouri Civil War unit projects. One is Confederate and the other Union. Yes, three brothers in my family fought with the Confederacy while their younger brother fought with the Union. The stories you hear about the Civil War pitting brother against brother are true!

http://www.geni.com/projects/8th-Missouri-Infantry-CSA-US-Civil-War

http://www.geni.com/projects/16th-Missouri-Cavalry-USA-US-Civil-War

Very neat Lizzie...I made two links for Missouri units, but didn't tie either of your projects in yet. Would you like to do that?

Just figured out that if you relate a project to another, it works both ways...the are both tied to the other in one step. Also, if you add a link to the project page (in the text) it automatically "relates" the project.

Year links are done...will start working on states with no projects yet next.

I love this idea! I am taking the same kind of approach as Anita. I've just been focusing on units and battles in which my relatives were involved. My main goal with war research is mainly to see the impact it had on relatives. For example, trying to see if any families married into other families because of bonds formed by battling beside one another or if any families moved because they fought somewhere. Breaking the Civil War projects into these various subgroups will greatly help my quest for sure!

Good discussion. Let me give some insight into organization and recommendations.

Here I'll just address numbers of "data elements." I'll write up a formal "data structure" recommendation for discussion.

For any given state we have 300 units formed generally - 3000 for each of the the Union and Confederate sides. The number of units who formed across state lines is minimal - about 2% on each side. Each unit was made up of Regiments or batteries in the case of artillery and each regiment consisted of 10 companies generally. Each regiment was assigned to a Brigadier General in groups of 3 to 5 and brigades were assigned to divisions and armies. Each company was generally formed within a particular county of which we had 2,000 at the time of the Civil War and this is the organization level for identifiying family units as you will generally find all family members serving in a unit formed from their county. I have identified unit designations by county on my web site for Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama. This has generally not been done for the other states.

There were 20,000 events (battles, skirmishes, etc.) in the war which can be organized by state, by date, by opposing armies or by campaigns.

Finally we have 3 million men on both sides who fought.

So to properly map out this project we need.

A state heirarcy showing units formed, county designations, and battles fought within the state, and bibliography of unit histories, diaries and journals, battles, county histories and genealogies.

A battles heirarcy showing "orders of battle", casualty lists, cemetery listings, bibliography, and first hand accounts .

An army heirarcy linking to the brigadier generals, their commands, their orders of battle, battle accounts and bibliography for research by this army structure.

A smattering of each of these data elements are scattered around the internet.

The FIRST question to be answered is are we going to create another "smattering" here or are we going to tackle the big picture. I don't mind contributing my research which currently approaches 20,000 pages on line, but so far I have found the Geni interface a bit tedious to work with and more than I want to tackle on my own.

John Rigdon
www.researchonline.net

John....LOVE your depth of knowledge and forethought!!!

Not to diminish your thoughts at all, this is awesome, but I don't think most of the Geni community is at your level of knowledge or interest. I am a HUGE Civil War buff, but I personally only have about 1% of what you are mentioning we need for my two ancestors two units. We also have to remember a couple of things... we are not all teachers or researchers, most of us have other genealogy interests that are more important to us (as well as full time jobs not related to genealogy at all), and not all of this information is easily available to a casual on-line researcher.

At this time, the main goal is to give a non-Civil War fan who finds out that their ancestor fought in the Civil War a way to recognize that on the soldiers profile....i.e. the "Other people in the Civil War" project. The secondary goal is to give those of us (myself) with a quest for info on what that ancestor did during the war a way to track the various units and battles he was in (i.e. state projects, battles, units).

The beauty of Geni is free for all with little limitations...anyone can do anything they want to with projects, and we can take them as far as we want to...we just need to remember this is a geneological site, not a history site or a research site.

John, I would suggest you provide us with a hierarchy in outline format as you see it and add it to the main project as a document (and write up an overview for it so it gets used and noticed), and then as each of us is working on our area of interest, if we find something that fills a hole in the hierarchy, we add it following your guidelines.

If someone decides they want to tackle something bigger (such as a whole state, or a complete battle), then they have the guideline to work with. We don't need to start by setting all of these items up from the beginning; if we provide the structure for creation down the road, we will eventually get there.

I'm agreeing with cousin Anita.

I'm also thinking, John, that someone techie may be able to massage together the hierarchy data and Geni data via the Geni API.

That would marry together the "quality / narrative / family tree" info from geni into the hierarchical / semantic structure.

I'm going to tag a couple of people I know to see if they can add value to this idea for you.

I am changing this a bit again... I am going to make a project for the States to link the State pages to....I don't like the huge related links list that you have to "show all" and scroll to see. I would rather have one project for all states in the related to list, and then the states related to the State project.

Same with the Armies...

The ideas just get better and better! I like Anita's idea to group everything together. It kind of creates a drop down menu in effect. I have seen a couple of company projects now. I will start adding in my own companies today. (Yay for days off from work!)

If you all would be kind enough to comment on this idea?

http://www.geni.com/discussions/93453?msg=710707

Erin Ishimoticha
Private User
Randy Stebbing
Private User

All...please look at the main project, then work you way thru the various gathering projects and make sure they make sense and work...I would rather fix them now than in a month when there are many more projects involved.

Gathering projects for: Armies (subs for each side), Years (sub for each year, and each year's battles), States (sub for each state).

Do we need more gathering and/or subs?

When you are looking, would you please check my work? The main should have no battles, no profiles (other than Lincoln and Lee), no armies, no states. Each of the gathering should have their subs, the main, and the other gathering, but nothing that would go under a sub (i.e. no units in the States gathering).

Tagging the gathering projects for the discussion...

The Years: http://www.geni.com/projects/The-Years-of-the-US-Civil-War
The Armies: http://www.geni.com/projects/The-Armies-of-the-US-Civil-War-1861-1865
The States: http://www.geni.com/projects/The-States-during-the-US-Civil-War-186...

First of all wow, the scope of this project is huge and I think it is cool that you are tackling it. I had at least four ancestors who were in the CSA and it would be nice to tie them to projects that showed which battles they were in and when.

Here are my thoughts in no particular order:
- I would tackle major battles listed on wikipedia and save the other 19000 for a day when geni has a better infrastructure for this sort of thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_the_American_Civil_War
We really need the ability to add an event to a project so that you can create a timeline for the project and then have nested projects where the child project inherits events from the parent project. Then you could add a profile to the project associated with his regiment and poof, populate that person's events in the civil war. We need to start begging Noah to add some of these features to projects :)

- There needs to be a master list somewhere of what projects have been created and which ones need to be created. Say for instance you take this project:
http://www.geni.com/projects/The-Armies-of-the-US-Civil-War-1861-1865
and in the "About" section you list every single unit/regiment/brigade, etc. If there is a project created for it then you make the text a link to that project. Same basic idea for a Civil War Battles project "About" section.

Is there a definitive list online of all of the various units, regiments, brigades, etc? If there is I should be able to whip up some code to print out that list in a format that we can put in a project "About" section.

I looked but there is not an API for creating projects. That's not to say that they couldn't add one though.

I think you're right Dupree and its time to start bugging Geni to take projects to the next level - and do it internally, not thru an API.

- Associating events from projects with a timeline and associating the Project Events with Profile events
- A visual presentation of Projects in Tree Format (son of Project A and Project B ...)
- Populating documents from Projects to the Profile
- Umbrellas and child relationships

ok so lets hash out what enhancements we would need to make this massive civil war project easier then take that list to the curator board, beat it up some more and then file a zendesk request. I'm going to talk out loud here for a bit....the main problems that we are trying to solve are:

- Organize thousands of groups of people (units, companies, etc)
- Organize thousands of events (battles, major milestones, etc).
- Associate various groups of people with various events
- Add a profile to a group so that they inherit all of the events associated with that group

Anything else you guys can think of? Proposed enhancements to allow us to solve these problems:

- need a way to nest one project within another .....so all of the companies of the Alabama military must be the child of some parent Alabama military project. This makes the grouping of people much easier since you would just have to add each soldier to his/her company.

- need a way to create an event (independent of a profile) then associate the participating groups of people (projects). So you create an event for the battle of Gettysburg then add all of the participating companies.

- add a profile to the project for his/her company and inherit the timeline events for that project. There needs to be a way to pick and choose which of these events to accept though. For instance one of my gg-grandfathers was a POW for a good part of the war so I wouldn't want the battles that his company was in to show up on his timeline for his time as a prisoner.

- need the ability to create projects via an API, define their parent project, add profiles to the project, etc.

thoughts?

Daniel, thats the way I would do it also. Brilliant idea! All we need to do after the curator discussion, is get the software to work this way.

This is a crucial piece that's missing I think:

"- need a way to create an event (independent of a profile) then associate the participating groups of people (projects). So you create an event for the battle of Gettysburg then add all of the participating companies. ..."

In other words, we need a Project to behave like a Family Group, and be able to have Events which automatically associate with the Profiles added ... but can be easily manually dis-associated (as in your ggfather the POW).

That would be a very cool enhancement.

What do you think of visualizing Projects in Tree format? I guess that requires the hated Flash, but I think might be intuitive to use for a lot of users.

It's kind of a different direction though from the events issue, and the events / timeline / inheritance through Project grouping is the "must have" that brings Geni into Google territory.

Can we talk about maps also? They have that on "ordinary" tree building sites and a lousy version on Ancestry.

I really don't know how we can talk Civil War Battles without maps though.

Wow...no offense, but you guys are way geekier than I was giving you credit for!!! Thanks for the input, the insight, and the willingness to tackle this for us!!!!

Daniel...you asked about lists....unfortunately, no, there are NOT definitive lists. Record keeping was not a priority in 1861...states kept their own records in various formats, the South was understandably different than the North, many records were lost, etc.

Right now we have the hierarchy of the projects set up well... start on the ground with a profile, tie it to a company, tie the company to a state and to a Division or Brigade, tie that to an Army. Additionally, tie the companies on up to a battle. The battles are tied to years and states, as well.

Will that setup work for what you are hoping Geni can do? Or do we need to chuck all that and tie everything back to one project at some point?

FYI...I sent a help desk request when I started the main project, asking them what they had in place for a project that could become this huge. They indicated that they had nothing in place to organize it, but they would keep an eye on it and work on ways to control it if they saw it getting to out of hand, then they closed the request. I will dig it out and post a link here to it.

Help Desk request: http://help.geni.com/requests/4467