 Welcome back to day two of the National Archives Virtual Genealogy Fair. Before we introduce this speaker for this session, I'd like to let you know that there's one more hour that the hotline will be open. It'll be open until four o'clock p.m. Eastern Standard Time. This is where archivists are waiting to take your call. When you have questions about family research, sometimes you need a little bit of help on that, and this is where you can go. Here's the toll-free number. 1-855-309-8404. 1-855-309-8404. Our sixth session today is entitled Genealogy through Navy Deck Logs by Mark Mulan. At the end of Mr. Mulan's session, he will be answering questions. You can, at any time, send those questions in live to you stream and Twitter. If he doesn't have time to cover all of your questions, please feel free to direct your questions to inquire-in-q-u-i-r-e-at-nora-n-a-r-a-dot-g-o-v. Navy Deck Logs. After you've researched the basics of Navy personnel records, see what genealogical nuggets you can glean from the logbooks created by the U.S. Navy. And learn about the exciting ways the National Archives is making these available. Mark Mulan is a Navy Maritime Reference Archivist with the National Archives, where he has worked for 13 years. He is the author of two articles published in the National Archives Publication Prologue, entitled The Army Medal of Army, The First 55 Years, and The Second One Honoring Our War Dead, The Evolution of the Government Policy on Headstones for Fallen Soldiers and Sailors. Mark is currently working on two projects, including the digital imaging of U.S. Navy and Coast Guard logbooks, as well as developing a website to facilitate access to studying logbooks of all kinds in the holdings of the National Archives. Mark? Thank you very much for that very nice introduction, Nancy. It's an honor and a privilege to be part of NAR's first virtual genie fair. And thank you very much for having me. And thank you for that nice introduction. Just one quick correction. The title of my article was The Army Medal of Honor, The First 55 Years. That was a typo on my part. I take full responsibility. And so let's go ahead and we'll start off my presentation this afternoon. Log, U.S. Arctic Steamer Jeanette, Navy Yard, Mary Island, California. Lieutenant George W. DeLong Commanding, Thursday, June 26, 1879. 8 p.m. to midnight. Hazy weather, fresh breeze from south by southwest, standing down San Francisco Bay. Jerome J. Collins and Raymond L. Newcomb were this day enlisted in the U.S. Naval Service as seaman for special duty during the crews of this vessel. By order of commanding officer of rate of Walter Lee, Copper Smith was changed to machinist with pay of $50 per month to date from today. Signed William Nindeman. Log, U.S. Arctic Steamer Jeanette at Anchor, Southern Francisco, California under command of George W. DeLong, Wednesday, July 2, 1879. Meridian to 4 p.m. Strong breeze from south weather pleasant at 4, received aboard 30 cases of alcohol. By orders of COGW Boyd, Cole Heaver was this day rated second class fireman. Signed William Dunbar. Charles Tong Sing, this day enlisted in the U.S. Naval Service as seaman for the crews of the USS Jeanette, is paid to be $35 per month. Signed Charles W. Chapp, Lieutenant and Executive Officer. Log, U.S. Arctic Steamer Jeanette anchored to a flow near Herald Island Sunday, September 7, 1879. 8 p.m. to midnight, clear and pleasant light breeze from the northeast until 10 when it became fresh and shifted north to northeast. Ice in motion pressing on board, pressing on starboard beam and giving ship list to starboard. A bear approached the ship and hastily retreated. William Nintman. I just read to you three entries from the log book spanning the early days of the voyage of the USS Jeanette. Two with valuable genealogical notations reflecting the naval careers of several crewmen, the signatures of the officers of the deck maintaining the log, and one notation that provides some context and even some levity in what would become a dire situation. Three days after that last entry that I read, the USS Jeanette would become trapped in ice, would be trapped in ice for the next 21 months, drifting past the islands off the coast of the northern Siberia. Now I've been very fortunate of late to be working on several projects relating to Navy deck logs. There we go. It can be a rich source of drama as well as great genealogical information as the logs of the USS Jeanette attest. But in order to delve into the logs and study one's genealogy, one must first know the ship that he or she and later she served on and also the time frame in which he and she served on the ship. And this can be found in several ways. First, researching naval personnel. First place to start is the official military personnel file. Where's our... So in 18... the official military personnel files that are located in St. Louis for naval personnel enlisted crew members start in 1885 and the files for officers start in 1903. Prior to this time frame, other sources of information can be found in Navy pension files, which are now available through our partnership with Fold3.com. Also research into muster roles, mostly for enlisted men, as well as for officers on microfilm publications M330 and M1328. Those are abstracts of officers' services for the U.S. Navy. And those are wonderful places where you can go to find information about those who served in the Navy, what ships they served on, as a starting point. But after you have done some research and you know what vessels your subject of study has served on and the time frames, then it's time to delve into the logs and see what you can find. Here at Archives One in Washington, D.C., two main sources of log books are firstly the logs and journals kept by U.S. and officers in RG45. This is a relatively small collection of 250 volumes or so that are some of the more important log books that were used by the Naval Records and Library. However, the bulk of our log books is found in Record Group 24 and Entry 118. Logs of the U.S. Naval Ships and Stations, 1801 to 1940, are located in this building. Navy deck logs after 1940 are located in our facility in College Park at Archives Two. Okay. Now I'd like to give a moment and talk about the origin of the term of log book. What you see on the screen is a device called the chip log in the left-hand corner. It's the chip log tied with a log line. This was a tool that was invented in the late 16th century for measuring the speed of a vessel, which was necessary information for navigating an open ocean. And how the device works was that you would throw the chip log, the crewman of the vessel, would throw the chip log overboard in the aft of the ship and count the knots that were made in the log line. And every 42 feet, there was another knot. And so for during the passage of a certain amount of time, the crewman would count the number of knots that passed by, and that would be the speed of the ship. And so that is the origin of the term of the nautical speed or knots. And then after that, a few calculations, that number would be written down into a book, which was known as the log book. And so this was the speed of the vessel that was kept track of. And with the log books that I worked with, that speed was kept on an hourly basis throughout the day. All right. Okay. So in the holdings here at Archives 1, there are basically three eras or time frames of log books for the US Navy. 1798 to 1815 is 1850. That time frame has a wide variety of information that's available in the logs. But as time goes on, the log books become more standardized. More detailed information about the crew members are available, such as in the 1860s to 1915, with the establishment of the Bureau of Navigation in the 1860s. More information is included about the service of crewmen, as well as the list of officers as found in the beginning of the log book. And then from the period 1916 up through the 1980s, it's a pretty standard format for the log books with increasing amount of information about the crew members. Save for wartime in World War II where there's less information in detail, but outside of wartime you can find more information generally. Now, if you know the vessels that your subject served, the least information that a log book can provide is twofold. The locations of the voyages that your ancestor sailed to and some of a little bit of the experiences that they had in those ports. And then also the naval mission in which your ancestor was playing a part, whether that was protecting commercial shipping around the world, whether it was part of a military campaign in the War of 1812 or the Mexican War, scientific expeditions such as the exploration expedition of 1838 that reportedly discovered Antarctica and explored several island chains in the Pacific, including diplomatic missions such as Perry's opening of Japan or slave interdiction off the coast of Africa or blockade squadron duty off the Confederate coast during the Civil War. All these important roles in U.S. history are researchable through the logs and vessels that conducted these missions. All right, so now early logs generally provide just this, the locations and some context of the mission that the vessel was involved with. And here, as an example, is a deck log page for the USS Constitution dated August 20th of 1812. Described in these pages is the battle with HMS Guerrier during the War of 1812 and in addition to the dramatic battle description, it includes more typical information including weather, water depth, exercises conducted by the crew, vessel sighted and also typical genealogical nuggets include some disciplinary actions against the crew and in the case of this page, it also gives the injuries of many crew members as a result of the battle with HMS Guerrier as well as who received the prize for the capture of the vessel. As time goes on, more information about individuals and crew members can be found in the pages of the deck logs. During Civil War, Congress authorized the establishment of what would become the Bureau of Navigation and logbooks that increasingly standardized to include lists of officers in the front of the logbook. And more information about the officers and enlisted men can be found on the entries inside. Here we have an example of the page of the USS Jamestown from October of 1867, a station in Sitka, Alaska. The vessel was there to oversee the transfer of authority of Alaska from Russia to the United States. And I'll read a section from the logbook. As you can see at home, it's in the fourth paragraph, the rather larger paragraph. USS Jamestown, meridian to 4 p.m. cloudy weather and light airs from north and east. John C. Stevens to land troops at 3 hours 30. The Russian flag was hauled down from the government house. Fifteen minutes later, the U.S. flag was hoisted. U.S. steamer Ossapy saluted both flags. Surgeon D. Bloodgood reported for duty this day, signed a Fairbanks mate. So in this short entry, one can see mention of three members of her crew who were witnesses to this historic event. Fast-forwarding on. Now to the more, the later logbooks that are in our holdings from 1916 and later to 1940. I took the opportunity in my own private time to research some entries of the service of my great-uncle, Thomas C. Green. I didn't have a lot of information when I first started. I knew that he graduated from the Naval Academy in 1927. I knew that he served on several ships, and I knew some of their names, as you can see on the screen. I knew that he ended his career also in 1947. Now when I started my research back in 2006, I attempted to write to St. Louis to get a service record. However, this fell within the 62-year rule, so I had to wait a few more years before I could get that file. But luckily, I had enough information that I could trace much of his career through the logbooks in our holdings. So here, and I'll just make a quick statement that all the blue markings are mine, and they're only digital. They are not on any original paper, so there's no defacing of any of our documents. And it does look like my five-year-old son might have circled them himself, but that's my own PowerPoint skill set that you see right there. But we see that he served on the USS California. You can see this is the first page of the logbook. You see the commander. You can also see that it was the flagship to the U.S. battle fleet, and you see the timeframe and that it was in San Francisco Bay. Now, all of these logbooks have a list of the officers in the front of the logbook. Here, we can see the entry for my great-uncle, T.C. Green. He came on as an ensign. You can see his rank. And then he reported for duty 26th of August, 1927, and he was a junior officer with the W Division. And so this was his first entry onto a ship after graduating from the academy as a junior officer. And so seeing from that page that he reported for duty August 26th, I could go forward to the logbook for August 26th and find his name in this paragraph, rather large paragraph in the middle. And I wanted to take a moment to read you some of that paragraph just to give you an idea of all the genealogical information that one can find. So if you'll bear with me. Eight to 12, anchored as before. Eight hundred, the USS Reno underway and standing out. Eight 20, published the deck courts of the following name men. Bevan's L, private, USMC, offense, away without leave. Specifications approved by plea and sentenced to lose 70 cents per month of his pay for a period of one month. Approved August 25th, 1927. Gordaniar B, seaman, second class, offense, AOL. Specification approved by plea and sentenced to lose $1.20 per month of his pay for the period of one month. Approved August 25th, 1927. 845, young, C.N. Reported a board for duty from USS Reno. Nine hundred, Ensign, J.B. Stefaniek, USN detached from his ship for duty on board the USS Chalmont. Mustard on station following absence. Gregory TM, Morgan J. McKechnie, H.B., Goosey, D.R., Sewell, D.M., Murley, J.G., Gallatin, G.W., Morrison, J.C., Cantz, J., Dueling, F.X., were mustered on station and were the absentees for the day. At 10.07, USS Algorma came aside. At 10.10, Algorma shoved off from alongside the lighter, Y.E.35, held daily inspection of magazines, conditions normal. Following name men were reported on board from the recruiting ship, San Francisco, for assignment by the Commander-in-Chief, Battlefleet. Akina N., Machinist attendant, first class. Baltonado N., Machinist attendant, first class. Daldato D., and Barracuatro R., Machinist attendant, first class. Following name men were reported on board for duty aboard the recruiting ship, San Francisco, Diversion J., musician second class, Ensign Dorch, Ensign Cooper, Ensign Bennett, Ensign Kahn, Ensign Leahy, Gassie, Smith, Zollars, Nicholson, Outer Bridge, Green, Stanley, Bowling, Beasley, Hickox, Zahn, Hardison, Donahoe, Bailey, reported for duty. 1155 USS Navigator came alongside with lighter, Y.C.269, signed G.F. DeGrov. Now if any of you are still awake, I counted 40 names in that one paragraph alone, with mentions to debt courts with being away without leave, changes in pay, reporting for duty, being transferred elsewhere. And so these are the kinds of nuggets that you can find in the logbooks that allow you to track one's career. All right, so moving along. And I can continue to track his career. Here's the logbook for USS California, the first page. And there he is again in the list of officers. And I have circled again, T.C. Green, Ensign, reported for duty, 26th of August, 1927. Here it's shown that he's being transferred to the Naval Air Station in San Diego for December 2nd, 1927, where he would spend the next two months. Later on in his career, he served on the USS Pittsburgh. There he is again, T.C. Green, Ensign, with reporting for duty in December of 1929. Here we are, the USS Manley with the list of officers, T.C. Green. Now he's been promoted to Lieutenant J.G. Date of report of duty on this ship was August of 1931 and he's the communications officer. And here we are, another entry in the USS Manley. More it is before, 930 held quarters for the muster. And on that last line at 1008, Lieutenant J.G., Thomas C. Green, U.S. Navy reported on duty for duty from the USS Pittsburgh. So you can see transfers, you can see promotions and a lot of things. This was the most exciting, I think, to me, was that while he was aboard the USS Manley, he had turns being the officer of the deck and entering the information into the logbook himself. And so I got to see his signature and see the exact paper that he signed with his own hand, which was quite a thrill. And here we are again with the USS Erie. We're on in his career. Let me take a pause here. So here is the first logbook page for the USS Erie. And studying the USS Erie, I learned that it was part of the special squadron in the late 1930s. And it was conducting drills and training maneuvers with submarines and other vessels that would, for maneuvers that would be used later in World War II. So just from this page, in a little bit of research, I was able to find out what kind of role my uncle would play in World War II and how he helped to prepare. In 1939, he transfers to the Naval Academy, where he teaches for two years. And for me in this building, my trail ends, here he is. He shows up again in the list of officers for the logbook. He's a Lieutenant JJ. He's a gunnery officer, second division officer, education officer, watch officer. He was a busy guy. And before I took on this project, if someone had asked me if I had ever seen a photograph in a logbook, the answer would have been no. In my 10 years of working with Navy Records, that had been the case until I took on this project. And you never know what you're going to find until you start looking. And in the first pages of the USS Erie, I found reports of the commissioning of the ship, which happened in 1936. And here actually is a vessel, a photograph of the vessel during its commissioning. And you can see in the back of the vessel that there is a canopy in the back, right in the back of the vessel right here. And that was to protect the people from the sun or the weather during the commissioning ceremony. And so these are the days before in preparation for its commissioning. The next page, which I did not include in my presentation, because it was very fuzzy and did not look good. But it was actually a photograph of the commanding officer with a number of officers behind him as he was addressing the commissioning ceremony. And so I'm on the hunt to see if I can find out which one of the officers standing behind him might be my uncle standing behind the officer giving the commissioning speech. Okay. Now, one question that is always asked of me after I talk about some logbooks is do I have to come to the Washington area in order to see the logbooks? And thankfully the answer to that question increasingly is no. Thankfully, due to a collaboration with our friends at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, we are working together to digitize logbooks of the U.S. Navy and the Coast Guard and posting them online. So let me talk about that for a minute. Some of those images that are going up online include U.S. Revenue Cutter Bayer. Here you can see a typical page, a left-hand side that shows the weather, that is the weather recordings that I talked about. Here you have the hours of the day and then the knots and the fathoms. And here are the weather notations here for the air temperature, the water temperature, the barometric pressure. And then again, this is the afternoon data that was taken for the weather. And here is the use of coal and other kinds of information here. And on the right-hand side, we have the operations page. And so you have the entries in our blocks from midnight 4 a.m., 4 to 8, et cetera. And then you have the signatures of the officers who are on deck making the entries. And so included... So I'm going to take a quick jaunt here. Talk about our partnership with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Two years ago, I received a call from my now colleague, Kevin Wood, who works for NOAA. And he called with an idea asking if we could collaborate on digitally imaging the logbooks for the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard so that they could take the images and post them online at this website that I'm showing you now called oldweather.org, where citizen scientists across the planet, about 10,000 of them, are reading the pages that we're digitizing here in this facility and having them post them on their website so that these 10,000 people can transcribe the weather data of the Navy and Coast Guard deck logs so that they can run weather reanalysis and understand weather patterns going back to the 1840s and 50s all the way up to our holdings up into the late 1970s. So that was a very exciting project that these logbooks that are generally used for historical and genealogical study could also be used for current scientific study as well. So we left it the opportunity. And as you can see, the logbook pages of these vessels scroll past. Here's USS Yorktown. There's USS Vicksburg. They're going up on these pages and people around the world are transcribing them to make it into data that NOAA can use. And on our end, after they have posted the logbook pages on their site, we are able to post them on our website. So here we go. If we come to our website, www.archives.gov, we can click on Research Our Records. Then we can click Online Catalog. And yeah, I'll give feedback later. And if we type in Navy deck logs. Got that right? Keep our fingers crossed. There we are. Then we come to this page and... Hmm. Bear with me. I'm sorry. You don't want to type in Navy deck logs. It's Navy logbooks. I apologize. So type in Navy logbooks into the search engine. And you'll come up with, in the second box where it says 84 descriptions, logbooks of the US Navy ships, 1801 to 1940. And you can scroll down here. Details. Includes 208 files described in the catalog. Click on that. You can come to View All Online Holdings. There we go. And so now we can see some of the examples of the logbooks that I talked about during my talk. Here we have the USS Jamestown, who was present at the transfer of the Alaska from Russia to the United States. And here is the USS Bear before it was the Revenue Cutter Bear. Arguably the most famous Coast Guard Cutter ship in history. And here we have the logbook pages of the USS Jamet, of which I quoted from earlier. And why don't we take a look at those. So now, visiting our own website, you can delve in and take a look at these very logbook pages. And at home you'll be able to zoom in. In there. So here you can see the weather readings that are taken on the left-hand side. And here you can see the notations that are made on the right-hand side. So I invite you to visit that website and check out those links and view all those web pages for yourself. And that'll conclude my talk. Thank you very much. And I'll be taking questions if there are any. Thank you, Mark. You have several questions. The first one probably is no surprise, but the Archivist of the United States has written in and asks, where would I start looking for the birthplace of the United States Navy? That's a very good question. In that it was a colonial Navy, I would start with the records of local state archives of the place you suspect the Navy was born. Or wherever many of the states outfitted their own smaller naval forces. I want to check with local state archives. Thank you, Mark. The next question, are you digitizing or working with the Marine Corps records, especially those of World War II? There is an effort afoot out at Archives II to digitize. I believe the U.S. Marine Corps muster rolls are available online through our partnership with Ancestry.com. And again, those are available free at any NARA research facility across the country, including presidential libraries. And I believe there is an effort afoot to move ahead with a project on World War II Marine Corps. I'm not privy to all the details. But if you write to inquire at NARA.gov, we should be able to answer that question. Thank you. Are there records available for Bainbridge Navy Training Center? There should be. It depends on the timeframe and let's see, if there is a training center, I was raised myself in Orlando, Florida for which there is the Orlando Naval Training Center at the time when I lived there. And those records would be much more modern in scope. If we had any, they would probably be at Archives II. I don't know when the training center was established. But if it was prior to World War II, then we should have records here. But it also could be at a local facility where the Bainbridge Training Center was built. It could be at the local NARA facility. So you might inquire there as well. Thank you. Do you have the World War II logbook of the DD-510 USS Eaton at College Park? And we probably should invite that reader to send that question to inquire at NARA.gov. That's right. If we do have it, it will be at Archives II. Is there a date range after which the Navy logs and other docks are not available? Well, the closer you get to present day, then more records that are not available here through NARA. They're still under the legal authority of the U.S. Navy. So if there are records that were recently created, then you might want to contact either the records officer or the Navy if it turns out that we don't have the records at Archives II. Thank you. And the next question. Have logbooks of any of the very early submarines been digitized yet? Not to my knowledge. Not in a project that is associated with NARA, but we do have logbooks for early submarines. And if anyone wants to take on a project, we can see what we can do to work with them. And this is our last question. My father served on a landing craft or LCT in World War II. Were there any logbooks or records? That's a very good question. There are some records of that type out at Archives II, but if I remember correctly, there are few. Those are generally small vessels, but I don't want to misspeak and I would have you contact our expert at Archives II who would know much more about World War II's records than I do. If I do know that if it was an LCT that was manned by a Coast Guard crew, then we would have the muster rolls here, because we do have U.S. Coast Guard records here for its creation in 1792, 1980s. So if you know that bit of information, we may have the muster roll here, but if it was not a Coast Guard manned crew, then your best bet is to try Archives II. Thank you, Mark. For those of you who didn't get your question answered or need follow-up, please feel free to write to inquireatnara.gov and those messages go into a bank that then gets sent out to the appropriate archivist and specialist to answer across the Nara Nation. So that concludes this lecture. At 4 o'clock we will be hearing from Marissa Louie. We had a short emergency and Sue Caron is unable to present today, but Marissa Louie will be doing her lecture for her and the title is All the Stories They Tell Chinese Exclusion Act Case Files at the National Archives and Records Administration. See you at 4 o'clock. Thank you.