Our first group milestone fell on Tuesday (2/23) of this week and it stated that we would have all the Slaughter and Murray letters as well as their transcriptions scanned. We successfully completed all the scanning, but we do still have 3-4 of Murray’s letters left to transcribe because we thought the transcriptions of all the documents had been provided by the National Park Service (NPS). This issue just recently came up and I emailed Luisa Dispenzirie. It was not known until this morning that a few letters had actually not been transcribed. Nonetheless, this can easily be corrected and the transcriptions completed quickly as the letters themselves are fairly short. Another issue with the letters and transcriptions is that 2-3 of them seem to have catalog numbers penciled on them that do not match the spreadsheet we received from the NPS. But Suzanne Chase said not to worry about this because cataloging errors are always common and usually an easy fix. The next task with the letters is to read through them all, but this milestone does not come for a couple weeks yet.
The next milestone falls on March 4, which is next Friday. By that day, Breck and I will have visited and filmed Slaughter’s grave in the Confederate Cemetery downtown as well as Murray’s belongings on display at the Fredericksburg Visitor Center for the introductory video to be placed on our website.
