I have been a subscriber for a couple of years. Unfortunately, there was NO specific search that would pull up these results until I annotated them. You could only search by name and sometimes state, but that depended on the particular database that you were working in and whether or not you were working with mixed state files which often weren't tagged for Texas. Some documents only listed town, and unless the company's metadata catalogers were familiar with Texas geography and/or Texas quartermaster names, they just didn't have a clue they were looking at Texas so they didn't label them properly.

Two years ago I started working on all of the Texas identified files in the Confederate Citizens and Business database, annotating for place, other names, and sometimes subjects as I went. As I progressed I created a listing of all of the quartermaster, commissary officers, and others that were stationed in Texas and who signed vouchers. Using that list I then went back through some of the Confederate Officer and Miscellaneous database files looking through them and annotating. I'm still not finished by a long shot. At the moment I'm working back through the Citizens and Business file again, particularly looking for those mixed files as well as other Trans-Miss vouchers and correspondence. You just can't separate Camden, Arkadelphia, and Washington, Arkansas from Shreveport, Louisiana, and Marshall and Tyler, Texas. Or the Indian Territory from Bonham, or San Antonio from the New Mexico and Arizona Territories in 1862. BTW, once annotated, always annotated, so anyone can come behind me and use what I've done. I hope people do, because I think there's a book in there about Confederate supply issues in Texas. Other states, too, of course, but I'm just not that concerned with Georgia and Virginia. There are plenty of others who can tackle that.

But I'm not totally ignoring other interesting things, such as this week's letter from a free black man in upstate New York to the governor of South Carolina just prior to the commencement of the war. It was outstanding, and we've been discussing it over at Civil War Memory blog.

Vicki Betts
Tyler, Texas