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Hi I’m Dennis Northcott. I’m an associate archivist here at the Missouri History Museum Archives in St. Louis. Years ago I began researching my family history, and as I talked to my grandmother about stories from her family, she told me about her great-great-grandfather, a man named George S. Gobel. George Gobel was a steamboat captain, as she told me, along the Mississippi River in the 19th century. So years later I began processing a collection of manuscripts in our archives here, the papers of man named Charles Parsons who was an assistant quartermaster at St. Louis during the Civil War. He was responsible for the movement and supplying of troops in the west. And in the collection there were contracts for steamboats in the government employment, transportation passes, correspondence, receipts and accounts, and as I was looking through this collection I was always keeping an eye out for my ancestor, George S. Gobel. Eventually I found him on this document here, and it reads “Expenses of the steamer Emma Duncan, while in the employ of the government, per Captain Charles Parsons, from December 18th, 1862, to January 14, 1863.” And it contains about forty lines of accounts of men he hired for services or for supplies in St. Louis during the Civil War. The first line, dated December 19, 1862 reads, “Paid G.S. Gobel for cleaning the boilers, three dollars.” Now my grandfather of course had referred to him as a steamboat captain, and perhaps be became a captain later in his career. We have many interesting collections and famous collections in our archives: papers of Lewis and Clark, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Lindbergh, but to me this is one of the most important documents in our archives.

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