More Pensions Online

My friend Stacey Jones has found online pensions on file for two more states:
Florida: http://www.floridamemory.com/Collections/PensionFiles/
Georgia: http://www.sos.state.ga.us/archives/what_do_we_have/online_records/pensions/searchkeywords.aspx

New Jersey's Digital Effort

The Yankees are digitizing images too! I added a carte de visite of a New Jersey officer (1st Lt. George L. Bryant of the state's Ninth Infantry) to my collection a couple of days ago. I googled his name and hit the New Jersey Department of State Archives "Civil War Cartes de Visite Guide." It's a collection of all of their soldier portraits, organized alphabetically. Check it out: http://www.state.nj.us/state/darm/links/guides/sdea4010.html#a.

South Carolina's Digital Initiative

Kudos to the South Carolina Department of Archives and History (http://www.state.sc.us/scdah/homepage.htm) for digitizing a portion of their Confederate pension records. The ease of accessibility and superior reproduction quality (especially compared to microfilm) are vast improvements on any other technology I've been exposed to. I strongly encourage all institutions to consider providing access to their collections in this manner.

Using Newspapers for Research: North and South

Here's a situation that cropped up during my recent research of a South Carolina officer: In my quest for details about his death in battle at Spotsylvania, Virginia, I contacted the Anderson County Library in hopes that they might have copies of the local newspaper that reported the battle. I was disappointed to learn that the paper, The Anderson Intelligencer, did not publish between May 1861 and February 1865. Not sure if this is just a coincidence, but it is the first local newspaper North or South that I've discovered that had suspended publication during the war.