Spending time in the basement!

0800-1700

Work continues on the project. Today I finished Hull #5 (U.S.S. Katahdin) which was Harbor Defense Ram, the only of its kind ever built. It was designed simply for harbor defense and had the ability to both fire and physically “ram” another ship.

Ok, about these plans… What are they you ask? Ship plans are the big picture but it goes much deeper than that. Yes, there are some plans that are what you can imagine the ship blueprints are but an engineer, at some point, designs every nut and bolt. These plans show the insides of the engines, boilers, decks, bridge, hull, bow, etc. There are even blueprints of wrenches that had to be produced to produce certain bolts on certain pieces of equipment, etc. Because cars are much more familiar territory for most of us, imagine every working piece of your car. Some engineer had to figure out how every piece of that car would go together and there is a blueprint out there!

In addition to plan #, name, date, condition and notes, we are now including size of the document. This is helpful if the museum gets a request by someone for copies of the records. Who would request these?!?! People who had ancestors that helped build the ship, sailed/served on the ship, authors writing about the ship, its voyages, etc or even ship builders.

Because I am working full time on this project (40 hours a week) and volunteers come in here and there for a few hours at a time, this is now my baby. Nathan has essentially placed me in charge of the project and those volunteers working on it. Continuity is terribly important and without it, the finding aid is useless if the records can’t be located when needed.