37th Regiment
Ohio Volunteer Infantry

Methodology

The method for this research is tedious but meticulous and thorough, and involves cataloging the data, usually handwritten, from the Descriptive Book to a spreadsheet format “as-is”, doing one’s best to make entries as close as possible to the original so that future historians and genealogists can compare it to the original. The data is then curated into another spreadsheet, using modern names for locations and formatting for easy legibility by the program. With data interesting trends begin to materialize, particularly when compared to other data sets. Cross-referencing the data (names, ages, occupations, birthplaces, and places of enlistment or residence) found in these Descriptive Books with Meyer’s Gazetteer, the wild card search feature on the site (www.meyersgaz.org) can aid in finding likely possibilities for those birthplaces that may have been misheard or incorrectly or illegibly written, locations that are no longer within the historic borders of the state listed in the book, or place names that have either changed, been incorporated into other municipalities, or have completely disappeared. Finally, using Google Gemini, an AI Large Language Model (LLM), a prompt in the form of a guessing game with the clues provided in the Descriptive Book, the process narrows down likely results even further. After geocoordinates of each listed place name are cataloged, all the data is then entered into Palladio, a Data Visualization program run by Stanford University.

Use of this method has helped locate approximately ¾ of the birthplaces of the members of the 9th Ohio (The Data Visualization for this regiment is forthcoming), and has up to this point mapped nearly ⅔ of the 37th Ohio. Initial comparison of birthplaces shows a few interesting trends: First, there appears to indeed be a chain migration connection between Cincinnati and the region of northwestern Germany some in the tristate refer to as the “Goettallelogram”, roughly encompassing the region area between Bremen, Hamburg, Hanover, and Osnabrück. This area represents some of the largest concentrations of identified birthplaces, with Osnabrück being the single-most mentioned name in the 9th Ohio, a regiment raised mostly from urban centers and primarily from Cincinnati. Conversely, the 37th Ohio shows no such apparent concentration in this region. Further, the 37th was raised not from primarily urban centers (although Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Columbus do have significant representation), but rather from primarily rural places such as Sandusky, Chillicothe, and the cluster of towns that make up a majority of Auglaize County: Minster, New Bremen, St. Mary’s, and Wapakoneta. More in-depth analysis is needed, but there appears to be a larger concentration of birthplaces in Swabia and the Hessian states for the 37th.

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This is a living project. While it is unlikely that every birthplace will be found, the goal is to create a database that can be visualized and used by current and future generations. Full access to the data sets used can be given via an email request through this website.

NEXT STEPS

As seen in the examples above, Palladio does not provide political boundaries, and certainly not historical versions, as "Germany" was a collection of nearly 40 semi-independent states until well after the American Civil War. Therefore, StoryMaps and ArcGIS will be two platforms used in further improving the usefulness of this project. These programs will help project these data points on an historical map of the German Confederation, providing even greater context to both chain migration and how German-Americans chose to separate themselves when enlisting. Following a complete Data Visualization of the 9th Ohio, the project will take on a more comparative structure, encompass all Ohio German units. From there, it will continue to expand to other states, laying the groundwork for a more analytical and data-driven way of looking at the service of German-Americans in the Civil War.