Seward Family Project

[tslaught]

The Seward Family Project at the University of Rochester draws on the Seward Papers at UR and other materials at other institutions and in private hands. Students in my two courses, The Seward Family's Civil War and The Seward Family in Peace and in War, are transcribing and annotating the manuscripts, and designing and building an interactive website for the project, working with a programmer, the director of our digital humanities program, librarians, graduate students, and me. We hope to have the website operative in about three years, at which point it will be freely accessible to all. We hope to build a community that will interact with the website and are thinking now about a crowd-sourcing model. I am estimating that the entire project will be completed about six years from now--June 2019. This year, the students are working in materials from 1860, 61, and 62, and I am also working in materials from 1800 to 1835 in preparation for their work in subsequent years, after they finish working with the Civil War manuscripts. At present, we are contemplating the project coverage as either the span of the life of William Henry Seward or through the lives of his children.
Part of the collection in our library's Rare Books and Special Collections Department was microfilmed decades ago, but only part. The finding aid is also incomplete and we are finding materials, especially family materials, that have not been utilized by researchers who have used the manuscripts and microfilm. I have also found over twenty family diaries and journals that are in private hands, and some Civil War correspondence that is privately owned, in addition to what has been readily accessible at other libraries in New York and elsewhere.
I am working on a book, The Seward Family in Peace and in War. Thomas P. Slaughter, University of Rochester