Introduction - John Henry Asendorf Diary - Spanish American War - Philippines


	The Story of a Pennsylvania Volunteer during the Spanish-American War in the Philippines and the Philippine American War

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Introduction to the War Diary of John Henry Asendorf

John Henry Asendorf was my great-grandfather. He was born in Germany and immigrated to the United States. At the age of 35, he enlisted with Company C, 10th Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteers to fight during the Spanish American War.

I have transcribed his diary which he kept religiously from May 8, 1898 to August 21, 1899. The diary is in four volumes which were snatched from their demise when my father died. As we were cleaning out his home we found an old garbage bag filled with cancelled checks, tax returns and old banks statements of my grandfather's which my dad must have scooped from a drawer after my grandfather died in 1979 into this bag with the thought that he would go through the bag at a later date. Thinking the bag to be filled with nothing of any importance, I set the bag aside to be dragged to the trash. As I picked up the bag to throw it away, I felt a sudden compulsion to go through the bag before tossing it. Inside the bag, there was only one thing of any importance... the diary.

The transcription is stored in a database noting the date, page and diary of each entry. This form of storage allows the diary to be displayed in multiple ways. As a PHP programmer with fairly decent SQL skills, I also converted a list of the entire 10th Regiment Penna Volunteers into a database which allowed me to create links to the individuals mentioned in the diary. I am currently working on a translation of the diary into standard English. Great-grandpa's English left a little to be desired. Although excellent for an immigrant, his spelling makes it very difficult to search the diary. The translation will hopefully allow researchers (and even me) to search the diary more accurately. Of the 400 dated entries, 174 have been 'translated' (this number updates instantly as entries are translated).

I hope that the transcription of this diary will aid someone in the historical field. There seems to be very little about this war in even the grandest of history books. The diary will be of very little use to the person seeking legends of great glory and bloody battle scenes (although a few exist). It will be of great use to the historian looking for methodical documentation of the average soldier during this period. The Diary consists of meals, training, sick lists, "we shot at them and they shot back" stories, soliloquies on Dewey and the War and slight homesickness.

John P. Asendorf

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