FFSS Internship (Spring) Week 9

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project:

Since last week, I have been working on editing the biography that I am picking up from last semester's assignment. So far, a lot of the work has been re-familiarizing myself with the content of the narrative and the sources that I have available from the original student's work from the course. As I mentioned last week, much of the story has already been looked over and edited by a previous graduate student, so the "Early Life" section barely needed any editing, and mostly consisted of me resolving comments on the document thread. 

I am currently half-way through the "Military Service" section of the biography, which needs the most editing so far. Much of this has been rewriting rather than slight edits to the language or structure of the biography. Much of the information is either not cited well enough to track where the student got it from, or not quite correct. The most challenging part of the editing is due to the soldier being an African American who served in an all-Black engineering dump truck unit. The student did not include a lot of details on the unit, mostly because it is difficult to find in the first place. Since editing it from last semester, I figured out that the unit was attached to another unit during the winter of 1944, however there is very little information on the specific unit he served in. I have checked in many places, and I have had no luck. This is not the student's fault, but rather a lesson in the documentation and treatment of minorities during World War II. 

The next portion of the "Military Service" section that I am going to edit has a challenge in it because there is mention of the unit serving in a location that the previous graduate student was not able to confirm. This will possibly be fixable because I can track where the unit that the dump truck company was attached to and infer that they were most likely wherever the attachment went. This will be my largest editing section for next week's work. After that, I will need to clean up the "Legacy" section before I send it to a project supervisor for review. The project supervisor and I are supposed to have the biographies ready by the end of March so we can swap, since she needs to review the one I am editing, and I will review the one she has edited because it is the biography I wrote when I was in the course in Fall 2024. I will be adding any new developments in information from the Rimes' family and the historian Samuel de Korte that we are connected with from that project. 

Until then, I will be working on the biography and enjoying my spring break! 

See you after next week! 

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