/ma-soldiers-and-sailors

Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War

Massachusetts Soldiers & Sailors of the Revolutionary War

In the late 19th century, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts produced a 17-volume compilation of those who served in the American Revolutionary War.

Those tomes appear to be in the public domain (both as a work of the government and as having long exceeded a copyright term), but are frustratingly hard to access. This is my attempt at making it easier.

The 17 volumes are organized by last name. Here is a table, showing the names covered in each volume, as well links to a copy of each volume on the Internet Archive's Open Library ("IA link"), a direct copy of the text file duplicated here ("Local text"), and a copy of the PDFs from the State Library of Massachusetts ("S3 PDF"). The "Local text" .txt files are not intended to stay here permanently.

As a courtesy, I would ask that you don't link directly to the S3 files from other sites, but instead make your own copy available. Bandwidth is đź’¸.

Vol. Year Surname IA link Local text S3 PDF
1 1896 Aacher—Bery here volume1.txt 76.9 MB
2 1896 Bese—Byxbe here volume2.txt 72.3 MB
3 1897 Caal—Cory here volume3.txt 71.6 MB
4 1898 Cose—Dryer here volume4.txt 73.3 MB
5 1899 Duarell—Foys here volume5.txt 68.4 MB
6 1899 Fracer—Gypson here volume6.txt 69.8 MB
7 1900 Haaoo—Hixson ? volume7.txt 66.5 MB
8 1901 Hmelen—Jypson ? volume8.txt 72.5 MB
9 1902 Kable—Lsubon here volume9.txt 70.3 MB
10 1902 Ltaas—Mopsy here volume10.txt 66.7 MB
11 1903 Mor—Pazel here volume11.txt 77.8 MB
12 1904 Pea—Razey here volume12.txt 74.1 MB
13 1905 Rea—Seymr here volume13.txt 76.0 MB
14 1906 Sha—Sthenfield here volume14.txt 76.4 MB
15 1907 Stibbens—Tozer here volume15.txt 68.6 MB
16 1907 Tracey—Wheylon here volume16.txt 74.8 MB
17 1908 Whicher—Zwear/Ztranius here volume17.txt 76.5 MB

Other Sources

The State Library of Massachusetts has this listing which permits downloading PDFs of each volume. I have these mirrored to S3 if necessary.

The Internet Archive's Open Library has some of these made available, including OCR text copies. I've committed these where available.

Google Books also has some of these available, but I haven't tried to organize links to all of them.

The goal

I would like to eventually transform these into HTML files, perhaps one per letter, to make these more easily accessible. The OCR process seems rather less than perfect; this seems normal in the best of cases, but working with very old books has got to exacerbate it. I'd love to try to at least correct some of the common errors.