So the past few days, I’ve been fiddling with the Google Ngram thing. I’ve looked up tons of different things (mostly related to fantasy books, if I’m being perfectly honest) and even a few searches related to my soldier.
Now, as with everything to do with Mr. Adam Meyer, I don’t have much to work with. He seems to have been a pretty low key sort of guy and didn’t do much at all after the war. So unfortunately, I am left with some pretty generic key words to search for him. I narrowed the search dates down to 1800-1894 (the year Adam Meyer died) and looked up Civil War, (which obviously came up a lot near the early 1860’s), veterans (which was popular in the later 1860’s), and rheumatism (which hit it’s stride in the 1880s, about the time that Adam started experiencing it himself).
Unfortunately nothing much would come up for coach maker (Adam’s post-war profession) which was one of the only real identifying factors about his life. So all in all, text mining was not terribly useful for my guy, though I can see how it would be for other people with soldiers who led more interesting lives.