The Written Record When oral histories are collected for the Veterans History Project, a few written questions are also answered. Once compiled, these written answers form a useful index to the archive. The Veterans History Project’s search function works by referring to this index. It quickly sorts the archive by gender, by conflict, by branch, and so forth. As you’ve seen in previous posts, this same information can also lend itself to deeper analysis of the archive. A Question of Structures Unfortunately, some aspects of the index are less usable than others. Almost every veteran recorded the unit or ships of their service. However, the formatting of their answers was…