Samantha Froemming's History Blog

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: This is my last blog post for this semester, which is so sad! I have really loved this internship and I will miss it over winter break, however I am coming back in the spring semester so I will look forward to January!  This week has been very different than anything else I have been doing all semester, but I am in the midst of finals, so the work on the packets slowed down, but I engaged with other aspects of the internship. The first thing I prioritized this past week was applying for funding towards the Florida Conference of Historians in January 2026. I am waiting to hear back about the possibility of funding, so hopefully it works out! I suppose I will update in January since that is when I would receive it. This was my first time applying for conference travel and registration funding, so it was a learning process on how it works with UCF's Student Government Association. I had...

  Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: These blog posts are pretty repetitive as of recently, since I have been working towards the same goal. But that is good, because it means that we are making progress! I have been consistently working on editing the student submission packets for the Colmar Pocket Museum primary source packets in HIS3600. So far, I have "completed" four out of the ten packets I have been assigned to edit. I say completed in quotations because I am just the first step, and then they will have to be reviewed with the graduate students' work as well, and then we can finalize them for future use. I have enjoyed this process, and I am hoping to get a few more done by the end of next week. I want to try to get all ten reviewed and edited before the end of the semester, however everyone's busy schedules may determine that to change. Until then, though, the work continues! This Wednesday (11/...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: This update will be very similar to last week because I have been working toward the same goal: standardizing and editing the Colmar Pocket Museum student submission packets. I have made more progress since last week, however, which is great! Like I explained in my previous post, the time it takes to edit these packets is the major roadblock in getting them finished quickly. The standardization process is slow, especially when students do a great job of including a lot of information! Although it has taken me much longer than I anticipated to complete these editing steps, the packets I have come close to finalizing look great, and I think the Museum will be very pleased with them. To give a frame of reference to how the timeline of editing the packets it, I have made it through one entire packet since last week, and I am currently half way through another packet. This is three (and a hal...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: This week I have been focusing on editing more of the student submissions for the Colmar Pocket Primary Source Packets. This process has consisted mostly of me standardizing the packets to look uniform and professional, which includes adding borders, resizing images to fit the page as large as possible, editing and polishing descriptions of the sources, and checking to make sure the formatting is correct. I also focus on making sure the citations are correctly formatted, the links to the sources are the correct links, and that the student included all of the possible sources for the soldier they researched.  I am supposed to have all ten of my assigned packets completed soon, because we will continue to work on and eventually send them to the Colmar Pocket Museum in France for review and use. However, I have been moving much slower than I would have hoped to, because the source packe...

  Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: This week was primarily focused on the Florida Historical Society Annual Meeting on 10/24, where I presented in a panel alongside Dr. Lyons, a graduate student, and an adjunct professor/elementary school teacher about student engagement with primary sources. I spent the beginning of this week working on my section of the presentation slides, making sure they were cohesive and uniform with the rest of the panel's slides, as well as constructing the narrative I would be sharing in my presentation.  We had a FFSS project meeting on Wednesday (10/22) to discuss the progress we are making on the student source packets for the Colmar Pocket Museum. The meeting was between Dr. Lyons, a graduate student and I, and we mostly went through the source packets I had polished in the week prior to set a standard for the rest of the packets moving forward in the editing process. We discussed ...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: Over the weekend, I finished editing the two biographies that I was assigned to standardize before sending them to the Colmar Pocket Museum in France. It took a while to get them both more uniform and standardized within the template given that they were created by two different students, but it was an enjoyable process. The most challenging part of the process was making sure every source that we could find was included, and inserting any sources that the original packet did not have. This allowed me to do the type of research that I did for my biography for Stafford Rimes in the Fall 2024 semester, which I continue to do while editing the biography for this internship. This assignment combines that research process, and learning the skill of editing which I have become accustomed to over the course of this internship.  In the background, I have also been included in the panel for t...

  Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: This past week has been a continuation of the Colmar Pocket Museum source packets from HIS3600. Since my last post, I have been checking the student submissions for the source packets to make sure all of the links are correct, the sources are credible and are the correct person, and that they are ready to be polished for the museum. For the most part, the ten packets I was assigned to review contained a good amount of sources that established a solid foundation to the packets, with only a few exceptions. The majority of the "errors" within the packets are links that do not connect to the correct place, or that the descriptions of the sources are wordy or hard to understand. There were a few that definitely need a good amount of editing and polishing, but they still presented good information that should be utilized within the final packets.  Many of the students were able to ...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: This week has shifted focus a bit from the biography that I am tasked with editing to the source packets from Dr. Lyons' HIS3600 course. Since our meeting last week, I have been working on my ten assigned packets to make sure everything looks correct, all of the links work properly, and that all of the sources that are available are included. I have made my way through all ten of the packets to do an overview, and I have been recently working on checking the citations, links, and that they have included as many sources as possible.   Anticipating our meeting this coming Wednesday, I have made sure to check every detail on the packets to prepare for discussing what is potentially missing and what we can do to improve the standardization of the packets in the future, before we send them to the Colmar Museum in France. I have made a separate document listing all of the types of sou...

  Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: Since last week, I have made much more progress on the biography that I have been assigned to edit for this semester. After going through the biography initially, I figured that the largest amounts of editing need to be within the Military Service section, since there has been editing done to it by the team before I was assigned it. From there, I devised a way to make the edits onto my version of the document while still keeping the student's original work to not accidentally lose vital parts of the biographical narrative. I came up with a highlighting and color-font system that allowed me to see where my new edits were and where the student's original work was, which works very well. Parts of the editing process are simple "clean-up" sections where I refine and polish the student's writing and other little things. However, in the Military Service section, there i...

  Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: Since my last post, the graduate students and I were present in Dr. Lyons' HIS3600 class on Tuesday (9/16) and Thursday (9/18) to help out with various parts of the primary source packet project that they were in the process of completing by Thursday (9/18).  On Tuesday, we helped the students with their workshop session after submitting their drafts of the project before the deadline on Thursday. In class, Dr. Lyons briefly discussed the types of sources that the students had found so far in their research, including the sections of Early Life, Military Service, and Legacy/Post Service Life. Many of the students had numerous examples of sources that fit these sections, with some of the students even having found pictures, high school records, marriage records, and other not as common sources. Some of the students had struggled with their primary source research, which could b...

 Hello!  Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: After last week's packed schedule, this week has been much less hectic. This week I am focusing on starting the editing process of the biography that I chose to work on this semester. So far, I have been going through the edits from the previous work that has been done on this biography to see where my editing will fit in.  The "Early Life" section of the biography has had the most previous editing done to it, whereas the "Military Service" and "Legacy" sections need more work. I will be continuing to go through the "Early Life" section to see if all of the information detailed matches the sources we have on our end, and making notes of any changes that need to be made going forward. There are also some general grammar mistakes that will need to be fixed, but that may come last once all the correct information is included so that we are not c...

  Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: This week was busy! Since my last post, I had a meeting with Dr. Lyons to discuss my role in the project which led to me picking a biography to begin editing for the semester. However, the beginning of the editing process was slightly delayed this week because of our involvement in Dr. Lyons' HIS3600 course. In HIS3600, the students have a project for the next few weeks where they are creating a primary source packet, which is similar to the beginning of the biography drafting process, although they will not be writing a biography after collecting the sources. This packet is in connection to a larger project in collaboration with the Colmar Pocket Museum in Turckheim, France. T o prepare the students for the work they will be conducting over the coming weeks, Dr. Lyons, a graduate student, and I put a presentation together to demonstrate what type of work they will be doing. On Wed...

  Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: Since my last post, the project had our first meeting of the fall semester last Thursday to discuss updates and further goals of the project moving forward. Because it was my first meeting with the team all together, Dr. Lyons mostly spoke about what occurred over the summer and how the project will be moving forward after our meeting. I enjoyed listening to Dr. Lyons’ recap of what she did in France over the summer with the project, and I am excited for what this means for the project in the future! I also thoroughly enjoyed listening to the team discuss individual aspects of their positions on the project as well as the graduate students’ work on their personal projects. I loved listening to the collaborative exchange of ideas from researchers, since this is something I look forward to doing in the future.   As for my position on the project from this point onward, I wa...

  Hello! My name is Samantha Froemming, I am currently in my fourth year as an undergraduate student at the University of Central Florida. I am majoring in History, with a minor in Medieval/Renaissance Studies, and I am particularly interested in Late Medieval/Early Modern Europe in regards to topics such as chivalry and knighthood, women and gender, and religion. Specific areas of my interest include France, the British Isles, and the Holy Roman Empire.  However, my interest in history is not limited to these topics entirely, as I am now involved in the Florida France Soldier Stories project at UCF as an intern after working on the project in the Fall 2024 semester for the HIS4150: History and Historians course. During my time in HIS4150 with Dr. Lyons, I worked on the biography of World War II veteran Stafford Rimes, a black soldier from Lake County, Florida. The research I conducted for this project was different from the research avenues I am more familiar with for Medieva...