Day: May 14, 2006

At home in Cotuit, here is the man in all his glory. According to the handwritten note on the back of the picture, this was taken in 1910, twelve years before his death.

I’ve scanned and uploaded a good number of photos into my Flickr account. Now the project moves onto the second phase of correcting the scanned war letters. When that is done I will need to decide how to treat the letters vis a vis the Reminiscences and whether to annotate the narrative with the details found in the epistolary account, or keep them separate and standalone.

Then I’ll move everything to Blurb, mock up the book itself, import the high res scans and finish the facsimile portion of the project before moving onto the primary research with the ship’s logs to determine the path of his voyages. That research will lead me to a Google Map tour, more contextual research (I want to learn more about the Gold Rush and Civil War is particular, having studied the whale fishery extensively in college.)

Then, when all the contextual research is finished, time to think about the book and getting it published. This is a very rewarding project personally and the antidote to a career obsessed with internet marketing.

There is a “Chatfield” photo set on my Flickr account to be found here.

I just scanned the letters by Captain Thomas Chatfield, written between 1863 and 1865 while he was stationed on the Gulf coast of Florida as an Acting Master in the U.S. Navy. Most of these letters were written to his wife, Florentine (Handy) and some to his daughter Mildred (Millie).

The PDF is 6 megabytes is size. And can be downloaded here. 

I need to clean up the RTF file and convert the file into live text. I take back what I said about the scanner earlier, I just saved myself three months of work!