Thanks for signing on to Civil War Bluejackets! We are working our way through American Civil War Ship's Muster Rolls to uncover the lives of ordinary sailors in the Civil War, uploading new content regularly as we move through the vessels systematically by letter from A to Z. We are currently asking participants to consider filling out our voluntary questionnaire to learn more about what motivates you! You can find it by clicking here.
A major research aim of the project is to recover the lives of African Americans, tens of thousands of whom served in the wartime Navy. The muster sheets can sometimes refer to these men in offensive and outdated terms. For more information, please see the Content Note at the bottom of our Research Page.
Results
How We Will Share Results
We will be using a wide variety of techniques to share results as the project develops. Ultimately, the work of the Citizen Scientists will lead to a free to access database of U.S. sailors being made available. We will also be running a conference and publishing a book on the ordinary U.S. sailor during the American Civil War following the project's conclusion. Throughout the project we will be regularly sharing some of the research as part of our ongoing dissemination and outreach programme. This will include written pieces and visualisations on our project blog at www.civilwarbluejackets.com as well as on our Twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts. Later on we will also be producing a short Podcast series discussing some of the findings. We will alert users to new outputs when they become available through a Newsletter and directly on Talk.
You can get an idea of some of the ongoing ways we will be sharing the results of your Citizen Scientist generated data in the visualisation below. It was produced based on the transcription of the Muster Rolls of USS Louisville, a vessel we looked at as part of a small pilot project in 2020.
