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 […]
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, […]
For those who may be interested, these are the attendance figures for the 1913 (50th) and 1938 (75th) veterans reunions at Gettysburg as published in the official reports of the Pennsylvania Commission: Attendance at Gettysburg Reunions 1913 1938 (50th Anniversary) (75th Anniversary) Residence # Union+Conf. # Union+Conf. Alabama 200 (0+200) 26 (6+20) Arizona 10 (7+3) […]
The 1913 Gettysburg reunion was the largest meeting of Civil War veterans after the war. Yet genealogists and other researchers have never had access to a list of those who attended. I am very pleased to report that I have discovered what I believe are the original, unpublished registers that were signed by the veterans […]