Word on the Street

Using Civil War collections for genealogy research

Civil War buffs and historians love Alexander Street's online collections for their rare content and powerful search capabilities. But our Civil War collections are also a useful tool for genealogy research. Jirene's Genealogy Tips highlights a few of the ways you can find information on ancestors that served in The War Between The States.

Alexander Street partnering with NINES

Alexander Street is partnering with Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES), a scholarly organization devoted to forging links between the material archive of the nineteenth century and the digital research environment of the twenty-first.

Their aim:

• Serve as a peer-reviewing body for digital work in the long nineteenth-century (1770-1920), British and American
• Support scholars’ priorities and best practices in the creation of digital research materials
• Develop software tools for new and traditional forms of research and critical analysis.

The NINES Collex interface is at the center of these efforts. It aims to gather the best scholarly resources in the field and make them fully searchable and interoperable; and to provide an online collecting and authoring space in which researchers can create and publish their own work.

We’re pleased to announce that several core Alexander Street Press nineteenth century collections are now searchable via the NINES site, including:

• Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period
• Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period
• The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries
• Coming soon, we will add The Romantic Era Redefined.

These Alexander Street collections are now completely cross-searchable within the NINES interface. Access to Alexander Street search results at the document level are available only to institutions subscribing to the collections, but NINES users are able to view contextual snippets.

To give you some sense of the scope of the project, here’s a saved search showing all of our Civil War Letters and Diaries material: http://www.nines.org/search/saved?user=DWheeles&name=cwld.

Alexander Street joins ProQuest, JSTOR, and many other leading publishers in indexing important nineteenth-century primary materials through the NINES project—it’s just one of the things we’re doing to ensure that scholars can find and access these important primary materials.

Updates to The American Civil War Research Database®

Already named the "Best Reference Database of 2008" by Library Journal, The American Civil War Research Database® has been updated with 100,000 new data points!

New data recently added to the online collection include:

• 8,000 soldiers' date or year of birth
• 4,500 soldiers' birth place
• 10,500 soldiers' post war date or year of death
• 15,000 soldiers' burial location
• tens of thousands of other new data details about individuals, regiments, and battles
• 330 new regimental histories
• 1,200 new soldiers' photographs

You can learn more about the entire collection and other Civil War collections on our Web site. To request a free trial or pricing information for your library, please email [email protected].

Today in History: 1865

We're opening access to American History in Video through April 30, 2009 at http://ahivfree.alexanderstreet.com. Through our blog series, Today in History, we'll feature video clips related to historical events occurring on today's date.

For pricing information and institution-wide trial access after the open access period, please email [email protected].

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On April 14, 1865, just days after the end of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was a famous actor and a Southern fanatic who had been planning to kidnap Lincoln. But after hearing President Lincoln recommend that African-Americans be granted the right to vote, Booth decided to take drastic action.

Experience history as never before with American History in Video. Click the image below to view documentary footage of Lincoln's final days in streaming video.

Today in History: 1865

We're opening access to American History in Video through April 30, 2009 at http://ahivfree.alexanderstreet.com. Through our blog series, Today in History, we'll feature video clips related to historical events occurring on today's date.

For pricing information and institution-wide trial access after the open access period, please email [email protected].

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On April 9, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee effectively ended the U.S. Civil War by surrendering to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, VA. Lee and his famed Army of Northern Virginia were in desperate need of supplies and food, and on April 9th they found themselves surrounded by Union troops. Although the terms of surrender were not immediately clear to Lee, he decided not to pursue a guerrilla resistance for fear that the country would never reunite after such fighting.

Experience history as never before with American History in Video. Click the image below to view documentary footage of General Lee's surrender at Appomattox in streaming video.

A Look Back to Inauguration Day 1861

We're celebrating the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States with a look back at the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. Enjoy two free downloads that offer a glimpse of what the 1861 inauguration was really like.

Taken from Images of the American Civil War is the photo seen here of Mary Todd Lincoln in her inaugural gown. With so much speculation as to what Michele Obama will be wearing today, you can compare the attire of each First Lady.

We've all heard of the similarities between Barack Obama and Lincoln, but even the preparations for their inauguration ceremonies have an eerie resemblance. The March, 1861 diary entry from Margaret Sumner McLean describes predictions that the Lincoln inauguration would not take place, the enhanced security surrounding Lincoln's arrival at the Capitol, and the preparations for a crisis. McLean also mentions how stunning Mrs. Lincoln looked in her ball gown, but notes that it was "the most unhappy day of her life." McLean's diary entry can be found in The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries.

Both of these items are available for free download at http://alexanderstreet.com/resources/featureditems.htm.

New Release of The American Civil War Research Database™

We are pleased to announce the latest release of The American Civil War Research Database™ is live. Included are nearly 150,000 data points to soldier records, battles, and regiments. These updates include information such as soldier residence, rank, place of birth, place of burial, and more.

Additionally, 1,500 images have been added to the collection, bringing the total number of images to over 16,000.

The American Civil War Research Database™ continues to be the definitive online resource for Civil War research. New information is added on a semiannual basis. For more information, please visit our Web site.

You can also access the homepage and browse the collection for free. You will not be prompted to log in until you browse deeper in the collection.

Request a free trial for you library on our Web site, or email us for a price quote.