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!
This is really fabulous stuff. I love the pictures and cannot wait to see the project pulled together. I am one of those (because of time constaints) who have found it hard to keep up with reading the story. I’m gonna pour a glass of wine one night and read the whole darn thing in one sitting. I think it’ll be better that way too.
I also totally dug the posts from China … what a great adventure, and a really great gig. Hats off to you.
Christopher
its funny to think there is a bit of our blood mix in my grand mothers dad is a cousin of one of your realtives which i have no idea what that makes us but i have a copy of capt.Chatfields book and i was doing a search on a painting which might have been built in cotiut mass