Civil War Bluejackets

The Civil War Bluejackets Project

Civil War Bluejackets is an Arts and Humanities Research Council UK funded project being carried out by historians of Northumbria University and information scientists of the University of Sheffield, in partnership with the Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean & Ecosystem Studies (CICOES) and the U.S. Naval Academy Museum. The project is centred on the exploration of U.S. Muster Rolls from the American Civil War which are preserved in the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Taken at regular intervals aboard all Union vessels, these rolls preserve an exceptional level of detail about the ordinary sailors of the Civil War era. Using the citizen scientists of Zooniverse, the project will transcribe these recently digitised rolls to create a powerful new database of these c. 118,000 wartime sailors that will be made freely available to researchers, genealogists and the wider public (You can find out more about the U.S. Navy during the Civil War in our Field Guide).

The full title of the project is Civil War Bluejackets: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the United States Navy, 1861-1865. The information created by the Zooniverse citizen scientists will be used to achieve a number of aims:

• Produce a new freely available public resource based on the mass data produced by the Zooniverse citizen scientists. In addition to a database of sailors drawn from the muster rolls, the team's information scientists will seek to link the muster roll data to other digitised wartime records, such as enlistment and pension records to create a Civil War Sailor Internet Resource to promote research in the history of sailors, the Civil War, and the social history of the 19th century. The resource will also be useful for those interested in family history, particularly African American genealogists, because many of the formerly enslaved first appeared in their own right with full names on ship musters as they claimed equality through naval service

• Produce a new history of the c. 118,000 U.S. sailors during the American Civil War, with a particular focus on the experience of both African American and immigrant sailors and their interactions with native-born white servicemen.

• Utilise the information produced by the Zooniverse citizen scientists to create new information science techniques for the analysis, accessibility and interpretation of 19th century handwritten documents. These results will then be published with the aim of advancing the development of these forms of software.

The Civil War Bluejackets Project will run until February 2025. You can find out more about our Project Team on the "Team" page, and keep up to date with developments both here on Zooniverse, via our webpage www.civilwarbluejackets.com and on Twitter @BluejacketsWar.