Week 2 - Categorical Oddities and Historical Context

This week, Lisa and I continued to consider the organizational tactics we wanted to use to tackle the Frank Laumer collection - we decided to collect a handful of the documents, with Patrick's permission, and take them to the UCF Library and Archive next week to continue cataloging them and maybe even begin digitizing some of the important documents we have come across. These files would finish the top drawer of the first filing cabinet, and will hopefully provide us a good idea of what approach we will take for the rest of the drawers.

Bin of collected documents and example of soldier-specific folder. 

While we have already established some topics we want to use in reorganizing the files for future research, I've been intrigued at some of the files that contain specific references to certain soldiers from the Dade massacre. There are several folders that trace the genealogies and contain the life and death records of these soldiers; all of which would be extremely beneficial for super specific research about Seminole War soldiers, while also being beneficial as a tracing method for the bigger themes of the war - just as Laumer appeared to do with these records. Question is: should these soldiers have their own categories and/or subsets? Should this apply to every applicable person mentioned in the files?

Other interesting files contain correspondence between Laumer and his fellow researchers, Laumer's requests for certain documents, his approval or denial for these documents, and the documents, if he was able to get them. This also throws a different categorical situation: is it best to keep all of these documents together, so that the sequential order and other minute details make sense, or should we separate the documents in terms of "correspondence" and say, "genealogical records" like we had decided before? Would keeping these papers together provide a researcher a thorough look at the question or topic at hand, or would it create a categorical mess?

Just as helpful as the abundance of records are, they can be daunting. Along with the specific questions presented above, there are several characters, events, and dates skewed about these documents, and it has been a bit overwhelming for me to properly categorize these papers without always knowing the historical context behind them. As such, I've been researching the Dade massacre myself to better understand the names, events, and dates of these papers - conveniently using Laumer's own notes and research to help in my quest for knowledge.

Knowing how wealthy this information is for fellow researchers makes it all the more important to have a cohesive method of organization and cataloging: and in processing the documents, I think cultivating my own thorough understanding of the Dade massacre and the general context of these documents will make this integral task much easier and much more detailed. Looking at it from the standpoint of a researcher will help me solve the categorical oddities.