with facility and accuracy the ground rules of arithmetic. that letter was good enough to get custer end but he ended up finishing last in his class. some other cool cadet applications we saw include thomas stonewall jackson and others, and you can see the handwriting is a little tough to decipher, but the documents are in great shape thanks to the hard working folks at the national archives. >> we have 80 million items in our holdings. we go back to the spanish american wars. the records are all permanent records never to be destroyed. our mission is to preserve them for posterity and to make them available to people who need them now. >> reporter: you can look up these famous warriors or your own ab a an ses ancestors until. >> it's all very fascinating. i'm a big civil war buff. this is great for people to see all this on line, you know, to be able to sample history there. thank you, peter.