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CNN posted this interesting story today about what some folks have called, “one of the most significant Civil War discoveries in decades.”

Some students from Georgia Southern have found what may be, “the exact location of a stockade and dozens of personal artifacts belonging to” Union Prisoners at Camp Lawton, a Confederate prison that housed about 10,000 men. Camp Lawton was built to replace the notorious Andersonville Prison, but it wasn’t much of an improvement.

The article mentions Pvt. Robert Knox Sneden, a Union map maker who painted some watercolors of the prison and kept a journal of his experiences at Camp Lawton. A quick search of Footnote turned up this copy of one of Sneden’s maps of Camp Lawton:

If you are like most of us, you had grandparents who said things like, “I remember back in 1935 when gas only 15 cents a gallon.”

Looking back, most everything looked like a bargain.

You might even catch yourself telling your kids that you could buy a Hershey Bar for only a quarter when you were going to school.

However, even if your memories have remained steady over the decades, the value of money hasn’t.

When you consider the adjustments due to inflation over the years, the real purchasing power of a dollar has changed considerably.

On Footnote.com you will run across many different documents that highlight prices of the day. Understanding the value of a dollar over time can give you a better sense of how people valued things.

But what’s an easy way to convert a dollar from then to today?

With the help of Wolfram|Alpha, we have created a simple calculator that will convert any price you find into the equivalent price today.

Here are some examples from documents found on Footnote.com:

• 1935 Ford V-8 Ad $495.00 (~$7,800 in 2010 dollars)
• Value of Edsel Ford’s home as listed in 1930 Census $1,300,000 (~$16.84 million in 2010 dollars)
• 1900 Louisville Slugger baseball bat $0.75 (~$19.93 in 2010 dollars)
• 1913 Steinway Piano for sale $215 (~$4,705 in 2010 dollars)
• 1872 claim made by James Gillen after the Civil War for two horses at $125 each (~$2,283 in 2010 dollars)
• 1780 Chart showing expenses for each rank in the army: Major General $3,945 (~$64,157 in 2010 dollars)
• 1989 computer advertisement for $1,785 (~$3,114 in 2010 dollars)
• 1868 The Purchase of Alaska for $7.2 million ($113 million in 2010 dollars)

Russ talks about Footnote’s innovative efforts to bring millions of historical documents online and the importance of making research more social.

Today Footnote.com and Lowcountry Africana announced the launch of a new collection of historical records from the South Carolina Department of Archives and History containing estate inventories and bills of sale for Colonial and Charleston South Carolina from 1732 to 1872. FamilySearch International donated the copies of the microfilm of the original historical documents.

Charleston’s role as a port of entry during the Atlantic Slave Trade means many thousands of African Americans may have ancestors who came from, or through, South Carolina. This new collection on Footnote.com will assist African American genealogy research by forming, in many cases, a seamless paper trail from Emancipation to the 1700s.

“Research about African American history and genealogy has often been especially difficult because of limited access to primary source material. Footnote.com is spearheading a revolution in access to the black past by digitizing major portions of the black archive, and making these records available on the Internet. The publication of these records from South Carolina in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the latest example of their bold commitment to resurrecting the African American past.”

—Henry Louis Gates Jr., Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

Visitors to Footnote.com can enhance these records from the South Carolina archives through various activities including:

• Creating and sharing web pages about the documents and their discoveries
• Adding their own insights and comments to the documents
• Uploading and connecting their own photos, letters and documents
• Annotating information on the documents, which creates a searchable database

“We are excited that Footnote has joined this collaboration because they offer family historians the ability to turn public records into personal history,” said Toni Carrier, Founding Director of Lowcountry Africana. “Nowhere else on the Internet can readers interact with historical records in such a meaningful way.”

“South Carolina has one of the richest sets of early government records of social and cultural history,” said Charles Lesser, Senior Archivist at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History. “This new cooperative effort will revolutionize access to an especially important segment of those records.”

Lowcountry Africana has established an online volunteer program to create the searchable index for this collection. To learn more about this volunteer program or to sign up to be a volunteer, visit the Lowcountry Africana site.

View these South Carolina records:

• South Carolina Estate Inventories and Bills of Sale
• Lowcountry Africana Profile