A recent post by Randy Drais in his excellent Battle of Gettysburg Buff e-newsletter (randydrais@gmail.com) mentioned that he found my transcription of the 1860 Federal Census of Gettysburg to be useful.  This blog also had two posts (here and here) in which I analyzed that census with respect to age, sex, race, occupation, place of birth, estate value, and other factors.

At about the same time that I did that project (when I apparently had a lot of free time on my hands), I created an author index to the Bachelder Papers. For those who may not be familiar with this series, it is a 3-volume set in which historian John B. Bachelder printed his correspondence back and forth with various Civil War veterans.

The full citation is “The Bachelder Papers: Gettysburg in Their Own Words”, 3 vols. (Dayton: Morningside Bookshop, 1994-95).

Many of his correspondents (mostly officers, both Union and Confederate) gave their first-hand accounts of the battle in what has been described as “perhaps the most significant publication on the battle of Gettysburg produced since the Gettysburg volumes of the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion.”

As fascinating as the series is, it suffers greatly from the lack of a cumulative index across the three volumes and one which distinguishes authors from other times that a person is mentioned in a letter. So it could be a lot of work to find a first-hand account from a particular officer.

My index has two parts. It is first sorted by author’s name. But then the second section (starting on Page 10) is sorted by Order of Battle. So you can easily find all of the Bachelder letters from members of a specific regiment, brigade, division or corps.

Note that my index doesn’t include every reference to every person that is mentioned in the letters – only the authors of those letters.

You can download my “Author Index to the Bachelder Papers” here.