Research Project Update #2

This is an in-progress version of my first map. I am trying to map the number of buildings in Vicksburg before and after the 1863 siege. I used a map of the Siege of Vicksburg from the Library of Congress to approximate the starting number of buildings. The building sizes, uses, and owners are not available, but this was the only source available that showed where buildings were across the city.

In my final paper, I would like to include a few case studies of individuals who survived the war. Thus far, I have found some information on the McRae family and Reverend William Lord. William McRae was an affluent merchant whose daughter, Lucy McRae Bell, wrote a first-hand account of the siege that historians often cite. On the Library of Congress map, none of the individual homes or shops are identified, but Lord’s church is labeled (and the location matches the 1860 town directory). Both the McRae home and Lord’s episcopal church were on the town’s northern end.

My preliminary research suggests that the McRae and Lord families were on the well-to-do end of Vicksburg. I would like to find one or two more individuals/families to follow that were on the middle to lower end of the socioeconomic scale. This may be difficult, because most of the (already limited) records are for more prominent and established members of the community.

While I have not posted them tonight, I am also working on a few other maps. The fist approximates the areas of Vicksburg damaged by Grant’s siege. My second map is a twenty-first century comparison map will either depict the socioeconomic or real estate development in modern Vicksburg. The third map I am working on should relate to my case studies. For each of the families that I choose to investigate, I would like to see where they and their families lived in the decades after the war. If possible, my third map should depict the locations of these families around 1870, 1880, 1890, and maybe 1900.

Thus far, most of obstacles are still related to data collection. My two sources for 1860-1863 Vicksburg buildings are not complete. The Library of Congress map only gives the outlines of all of the buildings on each block. It is often hard to determine where buildings start and end (if it is one building or multiple connected to one another). Further, the transcribed town directory is not completely reliable. One site (Mississippians in the Confederate Army) gave extensive information about the various eyewitnesses, their residences, and their fates. The McRae residence, for example, survived the siege and is still standing today. However, it sits one street over from where the town directory suggests it should be. However, the directory’s location of Lord’s episcopal church matches both the Library of Congress map,  and the website’s information.

For the case studies themselves, I had trouble identifying which individuals/families to work with. I could not find many of the families in the town directory in the 1860 census, and vice versa. I eventually decided to look into the McRae and Lord families, because I could find some record of them in the 1860 census, the 1860 town directory, and in first-hand accounts. As mentioned before, I would like to include information about a lower-class individual/family, but it is difficult to find all the necessary records. It is possible that some of the indexing is incorrect.  Even for William McRae and William Lord, I have been having trouble finding record of them in later census records (or finding a death date that would explain the lack of data). While I was searching for more records on the McRae family (so see if I could discover when Lucy McRae became Lucy Bell), a marriage of William McRea and Indiana was recorded. William and Indiana McRae were Lucy McRae’s parents, and the listed date fits Lucy’s parents’ ages. I suspect that there could be further errors in the transcribed records that are complicating my data search.

Because the available data is not what I expected when I first crafted my project’s question, my third map (of modern Vicksburg) will eventually reflect my maps of pre-war and post-siege Vicksburg. There is plenty of twenty-first century data available on Warren County’s website. I will finish this map once the others are completed or being finalized.