The National Park Service maintains the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System (CWSS) which is a database of the men who served in the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War. In the context of a larger project, I wondered how many soldiers served from each state so I did a geographic analysis of […]
A recent post by Randy Drais in his excellent Battle of Gettysburg Buff e-newsletter (randydrais@gmail.com) mentioned that he found my transcription of the 1860 Federal Census of Gettysburg to be useful. This blog also had two posts (here and here) in which I analyzed that census with respect to age, sex, race, occupation, place of birth, […]
Of the 5369 Union soldiers that were reported “missing or captured” at the Battle of Gettysburg[1], most of the captured were processed through Libby Prison in Richmond and then Belle Island on the James River. At least 303 of them eventually found themselves at the notorious Andersonville Prison in Georgia. The Andersonville records are incomplete, […]
The Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia, also known as Camp Sumter, was designed to hold a maximum of 10,000 Union prisoners. At its peak, it held more than three times that number under horrific conditions. During its 14 months of existence, Andersonville Prison held more than 45,000 Union soldiers, of whom 12,920 died, […]
People ask me all the time what a “Third Cousin Twice Removed” (aka 3C2R) is, for instance. The internet is full of “cousin charts” but I really don’t understand the point of them and I discourage their use. The rules to navigate the chart are more complicated than the rules to just calculate the relationship yourself! […]
While there are some wonderful free web sites (notably FamilySearch.org) from which you can access many online records, Ancestry.com and Fold3.com offer a wide variety of records that are not available anywhere else. In fact, if you go to the National Archives in Washington D.C. to access the original microfilms for those records, you’ll be directed to […]
Capt. Solomon T. Lyon of the 5th Michigan Infantry has been described as a recipient of the Kearny Medal and there is a photo that seems to prove it. The trouble is that, not only was Capt. Lyon not on the official list of recipients, but he apparently didn’t qualify to receive the medal. So […]
Annie Etheridge is one of at least four women who are known to have received the Kearny Cross. And, although she never actually enlisted in the army (serving as a volunteer field nurse or “vivandiere”), she is frequently described as one of the very few female private citizens who received a pension for her service to the […]
As some of you know, I’m writing a book about the Kearny Cross: a medal which was awarded by Union General David B. Birney (and named in memory of his predecessor) to members of the First Division, Third Corps, Army of the Potomac. There were two versions of the medal: the “Kearny Medal of Honor” […]
The list of veterans who attended the 1938 reunion at Gettysburg is well-documented … in theory. The official report of the Pennsylvania Commission1 includes a list of those veterans who attended but there are several problems with that list. First, the book is hard to find and therefore not readily accessible to most researchers. Second, […]