In May I received a wonderful gift from my third cousin Jim Varner in Ohio: three books on Civil War battles in which our great-grandfather, Peter Pelsor, fought. At the time, I was working on the narrative at the beginning of Chapter Six, “Vicksburg Campaign,” and the book Vicksburg: The Campaign That Opened the Mississippi, by Michael B. Ballard, was very helpful, although I ended up taking until mid-June to finish my narrative! The other two books, Pea Ridge: Civil War Campaign in the West, by William L. Shea and Earl J. Hess, and The Battle of Cedar Creek: Victory from the Jaws of Defeat, by Jonathan A. Noyalas, will help me revise the narrative for the Pea Ridge chapter and write Chapter Eight: “Shenandoah Finale.”
I also had another project that I had been working on this spring, especially during most of June: an account of the military service of Margaret Stout O’Donnell, my wife’s mother, during the Second World War. I had been wanting to do this for some time, but for Margaret’s 100th birth anniversary on June 26, 2020, I sent the report to my wife’s siblings and other relatives. It was really fun to do the research, which involved corresponding with several people whose mothers served with Margaret in the Army Nurse Corps in the U. S. and Europe in 1943-45, and you can find an abridged version on this site.
Some of the other Civil War books, which you see in the picture, are worth mentioning. I got the three volumes of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative (1958) at a book sale at Folio: The Seattle Athaneum, of which I am a member. For my narrative in Chapter 7, “Texas Gulf Duty,” I ordered The Yankee Invasion of Texas, by Stephen A. Townsend. And the book on the lower right is called Testament: A Soldier’s Story of the Civil War, by prize-winning historian Benson Bobrick. He presents his own great-grandfather’s letters (with many just an “author’s summary”) in Part 2, but writes a beautiful narrative in Part 1. I was browsing in a used bookstore in the University District of Seattle when I came across this book, and had to have it when I saw that Bobrick’s ancestor was in an Illinois regiment that was in the battle of Pea Ridge – so it was great to get another first-hand account.
I’m happy to report that by the end of June I had formatted all 133 letters into the manuscript (chapters two through eight). This involved doing the final edit on about 20 letters – all from 1864 – and then formatting the letters for chapters 7 and 8 as I had done for the previous chapters. This process was “old hat” by now: (1) copying all the letters from their separate directories into one file for each chapter, then (2) formatting the three fonts for title, body, and comments, and (3) copying each chapter’s letters into the appropriate place in the final manuscript. This last step was complicated by grouping letters together if they were narrow enough to be put in two columns.
But I still have the narratives to write for Chapters Seven and Eight as well as the Introductory and Final Chapters — so with all the final editing and publication details, I’m hoping now to be finished in September. I’ll let you know how I’m doing in August.