So I will start this off with saying that this task is the precise reason I initially chose to be an anthropology major and not a history major. The tedious work, the eye squinting, and bad handwriting of days gone past were enough to turn me off of the studying the field altogether.

That said, beyond those complaints, this was actually fairly interesting. And to make it slightly less tedious, I decided to make a game out of finding the correct date, because after a while there were LOTS of dates on a given page so deciding which was the one I should write down was a chore all by itself. I also found it interesting that my soldier, Adam Meyer, and his wife Mathilda were very clearly of German descent, given their birthplaces and a fair few of their notaries obvious German names.

I do acknowledge that this is a necessary step in understanding what data I have to work with, and am glad to have it finished and have the resource to refer back to when I start working on the more in depth parts of the project. An inventory like the one I just finished will be useful in that if nothing else, it will tell me exactly what sort of information is in each image file.

I have yet to complete the second part of the inventory task and make a spreadsheet of some of the more detailed information about Adam Meyer but when I do, I’m sure that it will be equally as useful over the course of the semester.