The Civil War 1861-1865 Project

I'm a computer engineer so I have a lot of practice at being geeky :)

You raise an interesting point about tying this back into one project at some point. Having one project for the entire Civil War would be huge but is probably more realistic than creating and maintaining tens of thousands of smaller projects. Ok so lets rethink the problems we are trying to solve but this time in the context of one big project for the entire war:

- 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

We would need:
- a way to create events with dates, locations, maps (great idea Erica)
- a way to group people in the project with the correct unit, company, etc. This is the hard part, I don't know how you would create a decent user interface for this when there could be 3 million profiles in the project.
- a way to add a group of people to one of the events

Daniel...another problem. My gggrandfather was assigned to the Army of the Cumberland, the Army of the Mississippi, AND the Army of the Ohio at various times, but not any of them for the entire duration of the existance of that Army, so he shouldn't be tied to ALL of the events of the Army, only the one's for dates he was assigned to it.

We started this as one project with all items tied to it, but within two months, it became unmanageable...you had to click a show all on related projects, then scroll down looking for something that you didn't know if it was there or not....the list became so long the page wouldn't load correctly; that is when I broke it out into sub-projects by Year, State, and Army. Even now, Virginia, was getting so out of control Donald had to create sub projects for it. In looking at what he did, I like it...maybe we need to just do it that way, and forget the "related" bit unless it is on a main project.... http://www.geni.com/projects/Virginia-in-the-US-Civil-War-CSA-1861-...

Attn: Everyone!!!

As you can see, we are still in discussion as to what we are doing!!!

For now, continue to create projects and relate them to "something" so they can be found later.

PLEASE make sure you get the naming convention right when you create the project..the rest is fixable/changeable as we go along via editing and relating projects, but as of right now the NAME can't be changed!

Eldon Lester Clark

For each state, the list of units is generally 90% correct and we can easily use those as starting points, I can provide them from my web site or there are any number of others which list them - generally as stubs with little or no info. below them. We have approximately 3000 for each side.

For the battles, they are all listed in Frederick Dyers Compendium by state with the Union forces engaged. The Confederate forces are less documented. The list needs some serious editing for most states and to be ultimately moved into a spreadsheet, but I can provide that in a text file by state and year. Since we have 20,000 to work with, I like the idea of only deploying the top 100 to begin and let the others evolve as interest develops.

For the orders of battle (units engaged on each side) they are readily available for the major battles, the lower 19,500 less so, but can be generally derived without a lot of work. Dyers work, Foxes Regimental Losses and Sifakis' Compendium of the Confedederate Armies generally have the information.

For the soldier lists, I have indexes for all the Confederate states and for Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Kansas, Maine, West Virginia, and Wisconsin for the Union. The other Union rosters are available at Civil War Soldiers and Sailors, but are tedious to extract. There are issues in trying to tie a roster to the existing person on Geni. The few I have tried can easily take a half hour per person and generally several emails to various people to determine which is the right person. We can discuss this more later, but this is the key junction of the data and essentially the only piece in place already on the Geni side.

Daniel has a good grasp on the issues of tying this all together. I think Geni has most of the framework in place and the ultimate framework developed for this Civil War project can be readily utilized for other Groups - think "members of the Lutheran Churches" or other social affinity groups.

John Rigdon

John if you can email me the 3000 units for each side I will try to format them so that we can put the Union units in the "About" section of the project for Union Armies and the same for Confederate units on that project page. We can then edit the About text to link to the project for each unit. John if you have these lists in some type of formatted output (excel spreadsheet, comma separated file, etc) that will make my life easier :)

Battles....I've been thinking about this some more and there isn't any reason we can't create an event (instead of a project) for each battle given geni's current system. So for gettysburg the workflow would be something like:
- go to the Battles project page and see if there is already an event for Gettysburg. If not then:
- find the profile of someone that participated in the battle. Let's take Gen. Robert E. Lee, CSA for example.
- go to Lee's timeline, click "Add a New Event", create an event for the battle of Gettysburg. Put in maps, dates, documents, etc.
- go to the projects page for Battles and in the About section link the text for "Battle of Gettysburg" to the event that we created for it
- go to the projects page for each participating company and add a link in the About section to the event for the battle of Gettysburg

So then we could pull up the projects page for our ancestor's company which would have a list of links to the events for all of the battles that company was in. We could then open up the events that we want to add our ancestor to and add their profile ID to the event. It isn't 100% automated but gives you a way to work-around the POW scenario, etc so that you only get the stuff you want on their timeline.

John can you send me the document you have of the top 100 battles and the units that participated in them? Formatted output is preferred if you have it. Once we have a project page for each company that participated in each of the top 100 battles I think I can automate generating some of the "About' text .

You may want to follow this discussion and beg Noah for them to add the APIs that we need :)
http://www.geni.com/discussions/96264

Daniel... We need a way to tag "new" projects....I think I am following about 150 projects right now, trying to make sure anything new is added to the right project. My list is getting out of control, and harder to manage. Is that something you can incorporate, or have Geni work on for us?

You should be able to see what is happening in the various projects via your newsfeed. Anything beyond that is something geni would have to incorporate.

By newsfeed do you mean my home page? I have that set to show me everything, but I only see people I am following and projects I have created...I don't see anything from anyone I am not working with.

I know how to control what emails I get, and how to control what of my OWN activity gets published. But I have no idea how to know that someone I have never had any contact with has created a new project. What setting am I missing?

I don't think there is a way to see all of the new projects that are being created in your newsfeed. Erica Howton ?

The closest is "suggested projects," which is fairly static, not very accurate, nor frequently updated (as warned up front).

I do think the SEO technology could be used to better "attract together" similar projects. I love the way it's bringing in family names, for instance.

Private User it's my day to bug you, but I think you're the SEO expert ... maybe we can enhance?

I'm already hoping to figure out some better way to organize projects. It'll probably be a little while before we can get to it; the roadmap is pretty full right now.

Just found another site with both CSA and USA that has correspondence, orders and returns, as well as all seizures of property in the south and all field operations.

http://digital.library.cornell.edu/m/moawar/waro.html

Any updates on how Geni and the Apps and SEO are all coming along?

We have finally hit the 150th anniversary of the first battle, so I am hoping to get battle projects created prior to their anniversary if at all possible. Fortunately, there weren't that many battles in 1861. so we have sometime before it really heats up for 1862 anniversaries.

Anita, you are a doing a fantastic job!!

Thanks Kwame!

All... I have started a couple new projects

West Point Academy - US Civil War (http://www.geni.com/projects/West-Point-Military-Academy-US-Civil-War). I linked to a list of alumni who fought in the war..the original page has a color coding for which side they fought on, which didn't transfer to Geni, so I just linked it.

And US Ordnance (http://www.geni.com/projects/US-Ordnance-USA-US-Civil-War) the suppliers of the weapons used by the north. I am sure there is a viable equivalent for the south.....

but alas...I have contibuted as much time as I can for another few months, so have fun and feel free to take over and flesh these out as you want to.

Thanks Anita!

What don think about a project about Civil War related arts, such as photography and the poetry of Stephen Vincent Benet and Walt Whitman?

I think that would be great Erica...don't forget the novelists....

Anita and Erica, especially Matthew Brady's pictures of the War!!?

KwMe I was just thinking of those. Can you think of a good title for the project?

DEFINITELY Mr. Brady!!!

It was only the second war filmed. The Crimean, I believe was the first!

Two project names I came up with are "The Spectacular Civil War" or "Civil War Artistry."

Go for it Kwame! Just add "US" Civil War to the names, please!

Here it is! http://www.geni.com/projects/The-Spectacular-Artistry-of-the-U-S-Ci...

Awesome Kwame...thank you!!!

hey all i have several ancestors who fought and a couple died. have lots of data from 8th Wisconsin Infantry. am currently researching the possible service of Lt Col Israel Robinson 67th Virginia militai died in front of Richmond in 1863 [ died nov not sure about the exact circumstances ] any thoughs reply to jhart251@new.rr.com. also just discovered the geni website and joined. will get my data entered soon. Thanks

also how can I help.? have followed much of the war mostly for the western side. Nashville, Franklin Vicksburg, Corinth etc was following the 8th Wisc infantry [ancestor in the unit] this sound like fun and Id love to get involved if y'all need the help. Thanx jhart251@new.rr.com

Would love the help! Read some of the structure and discussions. The idea is to create sub projects as we have the information, as well as identify "notables." You may inspire me!