Quoting from the Preface of Hugh St. Clair's Civil War Diary on CD-ROM:

Hugh St. Clair was born on his parent’s farm in West Wheatfield Township, Indiana County, Pennsylvania on the 12th of June in 1827. His father, Archibald St. Clair, was born in County Tyrone, Ireland, and came to America in 1802 at the age of seven years with his parents Hugh and Rebecca (Beatty) St. Clair. In 1850, Hugh moved northwest to Oil Creek Township, Crawford County, Pennsylvania where relatives of his mother Esther Alcorn, and his grandmother Mary Mars, had been living since around 1800. Here Hugh married, on December 28 of that same year, his second cousin Mary Crawford Kerr.

Hugh’s father Archibald St. Clair also moved to Crawford County in 1859, where most of his sons and daughters then lived. Three of Archibald’s sons -Hugh, Samuel and Archibald Jr., and two of his sons-in-law - John Mack and Samuel M. Edmond, enlisted for three-year terms in Company D of the 18th Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry. The capture of Arch Jr. is noted in Hugh’s diary on 6 July, 1863, and his death noted on 6 September. In September of 1862 when Hugh enlisted in the 18th Pennsylvania Cavalry, he was 35 years old and the father of 5 children, the oldest still ten years old, and the youngest not yet two. The 6th child, a daughter Maria Isabelle, was born two months later, and lived just over a year. She died while Hugh was home on furlough in January of 1864.

Two years after his discharge, Hugh St. Clair moved his family west to Benton County, Iowa, where a number of related families had settled in the area around Vinton. Here he lived for thirty-one years on his farm on section 10 in Jackson Township. He then moved to Vinton, where he died on 25 June 1911. An item in his obituary in the Vinton Eagle adds a footnote to the diary account of 6 July 1863, which tells of Hugh taking refuge in the cellar of one D. Williamson during a battle in Hagerstown, Maryland - "An incident that serves to show his spirit of gratitude occurred during the Civil War, etc . . . each Christmas until his death, Mr. Williamson received a ten dollar bill from Mr. St. Clair."

Hugh St. Clair kept a diary every day for the year 1863, a diary that still exists today and has been transcribed to CD-ROM. Private St. Clair apparently purchased a blank book made for this purpose. The journal is printed with a title page, "Pocket Diary for 1863, Containing a Blank Space for Every Day in the Year." Hugh St. Clair then filled in an entry almost every day. One would assume that Private St. Clair may have kept diaries in the years before and after 1863. However, if he did so, those diaries have never been found and made public. The details of 1863 are all that are available to date.

Patricia St. Clair Ostwald eventually obtained the original diary, transcribed it, and published it in book format in 1993. W. Michael Kiteley of the SoftEase Company converted the book to Adobe Acrobat format in 2000, and SunShine Press Publications soon published the result on CD-ROM. The Adobe Acrobat software is an excellent choice as the CD-ROM disk can be used on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and some other systems as well. I wish that all CD-ROM disks were operating system-independent.

Opening up the Hugh St. Clair Civil War Diary on CD-ROM for the first time, you see a colorful title page and a Table of Contents list at the extreme left side of the screen. You can then leaf through the diary, one page at a time, or else jump to any section by clicking on the appropriate entry in the Table of Contents.

The interesting part is that you see an image of the actual diary in the center of your screen, surrounded by transcribed text from the page displayed. In other words, you see an open diary showing the pages for one week. For instance, page 24 of the Acrobat document covers the week of April 28 through 3 May 1863. The handwritten words on the page can be read, although with some difficulty. To the left of the image you see the transcribed words for 28, 29 and 30 April as computer text. To the right, you see similar computer text for each day from 1-3 May. For instance, the entry for 29 April says, "arrived in camp 2 AM, captured 75 prisoners and 100 horses, lost 8 men and 1 Lieut in advance gard [sic], tired and sleepy."

Page after page follows, detailing the life of a soldier in the American Civil War. He chronicles the tedium of camp life along with the horror of battle. This diary provides a fascinating insight into one person’s experiences in the most difficult of times.

The CD-ROM’s images of the original pages can be manipulated easily in Adobe Acrobat. You can zoom in to examine the handwriting closely. You can rotate the images clockwise or counterclockwise, a nice feature since some of the text at the beginning was written sideways on the page. You can also print individual pages on your local printer. I found that copies printed on my inkjet printer were clear and rather easy to read.

The CD-ROM disk includes full text as well as images of the original diary pages. This information is supplemented with numerous articles, photographs, etchings, and even an animated map showing encampments, movements, skirmishes, and battles of Mr. St. Clair's regiment.

The Hugh St. Clair Civil War Diary on CD-ROM should appeal to many people. Obviously, any of his descendants will want to obtain this fascinating account of an ancestor’s life. However, many students and historians will also be interested in this "insider’s view" of the American Civil War. His daily entries are usually brief, but Private St. Clair did record a lot of details not always found in history books.

The Hugh St. Clair Civil War Diary on CD-ROM is one of the better genealogy CD-ROM disks I have used. It combines excellent image reproductions of the original historical document, a full text transcription of every word in the original document, plus a lot of supplementary material. All of this is wrapped up in a software package that is easy to use on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux.

Hugh St. Clair Civil War Diary on CD-ROM sells for $19.95 plus shipping. It is available directly from its publisher, SunShine Press Publications. For more information, Look at: www.sunshinepress.com/cds.htm

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