Lincoln Editor

              July - September 2005 Volume 5 Number 3
ERIKA NUNAMAKER JOINS EDITORIAL STAFF
In September, Erika Nunamaker joined the project staff
as a research associate. Her position is part of the project’s
expansion for work on Series II and Series III of the Papers
of Abraham Lincoln.
Nunamaker, a native of Mundelein, Illinois, earned
a B.A. in history and English from Illinois Wesleyan University
in 2001. In 2003, she completed a Master’s degree in Early
American Culture from the University of Delaware through
the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum in Winterthur,
Delaware. During her time at Illinois Wesleyan, she was an
intern at the David Davis Mansion and at the McLean County
Museum of History. Her training at the Winterthur included
work as a Senior Guide at the museum. She joins the project
from her most recent post as an educator at Dickson Mounds
Museum in Lewistown, Illinois.
Nunamaker is the author of two articles,
“Schoolhouses of the Past in Illinois: The Era of One-Room
Schools,” published in The Living
Museum in 2005 and “Trembling for
the Nation: Illinois Women and the
Election of 1860,” published in the
Journal of Illinois History in 2002.
She lives in Lincoln with her husband.
In her capacity as a research
associate, Nunamaker will initially
conduct work related to the search
for documents in libraries and
repositories across the country. She
is now working to determine priority locations to which staff
members will travel in the next year to collect digital images.
PROJECT RECEIVES SUPPORT FOR ONGOING RESEARCH
The late Dr. Clarence A. Tripp, author of The Intimate
World of Abraham Lincoln, left a bequest to the Illinois
Historic Preservation Agency’s Public Trust Fund. Illinois
State Historian Dr. Thomas F. Schwartz, who chairs the
committee in charge of the bequest, indicated that $100,000
would be given annually to the Papers of Abraham Lincoln
for the next five years. According to Dr. Schwartz, “Any
serious study of Lincoln is dependent upon a comprehensive
compilation, accurate transcription, and informed editorial
annotation of all his correspondence. The Papers of Abraham
Lincoln will be the most significant contribution to Lincoln
studies since the 1953 publication of The Collected Works.”
In addition to this generous gift, the Abraham Lincoln
Presidential Library and Museum Foundation pledged
$50,000 to support the project in the current fiscal year.
The project will use the funds primarily to begin
research at the National Archives facilities in College Park,
Maryland, and in Washington, D.C. These two repositories
hold most of the official records of the federal government.
The papers of the Civil War-era State Department, Treasury
Department, and Interior Department are at the facility in
College Park, while War Department, Congressional,
Judiciary, and other records are housed in the National
Archives building on Pennsylvania Avenue in downtown
Washington.
Project researchers have identified seventy-eight
record groups in the National Archives that may contain
Lincoln documents. Each record group is subdivided into a
number of record series, each of which has its own internal
organization. Although the task is complex, there are more
undiscovered documents in the collections of the National
Archives than in any other repository.