Month: April 2011

150 years ago today, 12 April 1861, the Civ­il War start­ed in earnest with a Con­fed­er­ate attack on the Fed­er­al posi­tion at Fort Sumter, in advance of sup­ply ships arriv­ing with food to resup­ply the fort.

For Amer­i­can geneal­o­gists and his­to­ri­ans of the Unit­ed States, the Civ­il War is the cen­tral event, even more calami­tous than the Rev­o­lu­tion, and affect­ing the lives of a wider per­cent­age of what had become, since the Rev­o­lu­tion, a more pop­u­lous coun­try. (In the 1790 cen­sus, the pop­u­la­tion was record­ed to be 3,929,214. In the 1860 cen­sus, the pop­u­la­tion was 31,443,321, or eight times larg­er.)

Some­where between 618,000 and 700,000 sol­diers died in the con­flict, mak­ing it more dead­ly than all the oth­er wars the US par­tic­i­pat­ed in from the Rev­o­lu­tion to the Viet­nam War, com­bined. And, of course, the war, fought main­ly (despite revi­sion­ist protests to the con­trary) to main­tain a way of life found­ed on enslav­ing a race of peo­ple, end­ed by grant­i­ng free­dom, first to blacks in states which had seced­ed, and then to all blacks in all states and ter­ri­to­ries of the US.

This trans­for­ma­tive time is full of records for geneal­o­gists. There are mil­i­tary and pen­sion records, which are some of the best known mil­i­tary records from this peri­od. But there are also the final pay­ment vouch­ers, reports of camps, forts, and pris­ons, numer­ous man­u­scripts, the papers of the South­ern Claims Com­mis­sion, which “was an orga­ni­za­tion of the exec­u­tive branch of the Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment from 1871–1873 under Pres­i­dent Grant. Its pur­pose was to allow Union sym­pa­thiz­ers who had lived in the South­ern states dur­ing the Amer­i­can Civ­il War, 1861–1865, to apply for reim­burse­ments for prop­er­ty loss­es due to U.S. Army con­fis­ca­tions dur­ing the war” (Wikipedia. “South­ern Claims Com­mis­sion,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Claims_Commission Accessed : 13 April 2011).

If you have not start­ed look­ing for your Civ­il War ances­tor, you could do much worse than start with the Civ­il War Sol­diers and Sailors Sys­tem: http://www.itd.nps.gov/cwss/. This site includes a search­able data­base of over 6.3 mil­lion names of com­bat­tants from the North and the South, rep­re­sent­ing 44 states and ter­ri­to­ries. There are also many sailors, though this part of the project is not com­plete. The site pro­vides lim­it­ed infor­ma­tion, but usu­al­ly includes enough infor­ma­tion to find out more about your sol­dier. For exam­ple, my 3rd great grand­fa­ther, Thomas D. Via, has this entry:

Thomas D. Via (First_Last)

Reg­i­ment Name 7 Vir­ginia Infantry

Side Con­fed­er­ate

Com­pa­ny I

Sol­dier’s Rank_In Pri­vate

Sol­dier’s Rank_Out Pri­vate

Alter­nate Name

Notes

Film Num­ber M382 roll 57

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And also, this:

Thomas D. Via (First_Last)

Reg­i­ment Name 7 Vir­ginia Infantry

Side Con­fed­er­ate

Com­pa­ny I

Sol­dier’s Rank_In Pri­vate

Sol­dier’s Rank_Out Pri­vate

Alter­nate Name

Notes

Film Num­ber M382 roll 57

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(He served in the Con­fed­er­ate army, was cap­tured, and joined the Union army, most like­ly as a way out of the prison camp he was in at Point Look­out, Mary­land. For more infor­ma­tion see, Sur­name Sat­ur­day: Via.

As the sesqui­cen­ten­ni­al con­tin­ues, I will pro­vide oth­er sites and tips for Civ­il War research.

The Unit­ed States Cen­sus Bureau has a page out­lin­ing its data access tools. While the data being made avail­able is sta­tis­ti­cal data, not per­son­al­ly iden­ti­fi­able genealog­i­cal data, it should be of inter­est to geneal­o­gists to under­stand trends and the pop­u­la­tion trends and geog­ra­phy of the Unit­ed States.

The site pro­vides large datasets for analy­sis, but also allows you to nav­i­gate into pop­u­la­tion demo­graph­ics for any coun­ty, state, or munic­i­pal­i­ty in the Unit­ed States.

Here are some of the resources avail­able on the page:

• Cen­stats — Appli­ca­tions avail­able include: Cen­sus Tract Street Loca­tor, Coun­ty Busi­ness Pat­terns, Zip Busi­ness Pat­terns, Inter­na­tion­al Trade Data, and more.
• Quick­Facts — State and Coun­ty Quick­Facts pro­vides fre­quent­ly request­ed Cen­sus Bureau infor­ma­tion at the nation­al, state, coun­ty, and city lev­el.
• Online Map­ping Tools — using TIGER and the Amer­i­can FactFind­er
• US Gazetteer — Place name, and ZIP code search engine.

I am look­ing for­ward to hav­ing the oppor­tu­ni­ty to look at these resources.

Tonight, Ash­ley Judd was the celebri­ty on the sea­son finale of Who Do You Think You Are?

Her fam­i­ly sto­ry is com­pelling, and includes a Union Civ­il War vet­er­an from Ken­tucky, who was cap­tured twice by the Con­fed­er­ates, and was a bat­tle­field amputee.

Addi­tion­al­ly, her line goes back to the ear­li­est days of the Ply­mouth Bay Colony in Mass­a­chu­setts.

The show pre­sent­ed her as doing some of the research with her father. This was­n’t an entire­ly believ­able por­tion of the show.

At one point, a researcher indi­cat­ed that the Civ­il War ances­tor’s age of 18 at the mus­ter­ing in and 18 at mus­ter­ing out might have indi­cat­ed that he lied about his age on mus­ter­ing in. That is cer­tain­ly pos­si­ble. But the age being the same on mus­ter­ing in and out is com­mon through­out US mil­i­tary records, and is sim­ply reflec­tive of a prac­tice that lists the age at mus­ter­ing in instead of the sol­dier’s cur­rent age through­out the records about that sol­dier.

How­ev­er, despite that glitch, it was a com­pelling, dra­mat­ic, and emo­tion­al sea­son finale. The video will be avail­able for a lim­it­ed time on demand at: http://www.nbc.com/who-do-you-think-you-are/episode-guide/

This week’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are? returns to a more tra­di­tion­al research method­ol­o­gy, start­ing from what is known, and mov­ing back­ward to illu­mi­nate the unknown.

While many crit­ics will note that the star did not engage with much of the research, and was being hand­ed hours of research in a moment, I appre­ci­at­ed the use of fam­i­ly lore (a Bar­ba­dos back­ground on the moth­er’s side; a line of rab­bis on the father’s side). Instead of mak­ing assump­tions that this lore was gen­uine­ly true, the researchers took it as clues to what they might find. There was an acknowl­edge­ment that the lore could be true or false, mis-remem­bered, mis­un­der­stood, or very very close.

In addi­tion to the lore about the line of rab­bis and the ances­tor from Bar­ba­dos, the third inter­est for Ms. Pal­trow was find­ing out if there was any way to under­stand what had hap­pened in her pater­nal grand­fa­ther’s youth to make him ret­i­cent to talk about it oth­er than to say that he did not live in a home like she did. She dis­cov­ered details about her great grand­moth­er, the loss­es that she endured, which helped her put it in per­spec­tive. This would have been a per­fect oppor­tu­ni­ty to dis­cuss the change, his­tor­i­cal­ly, in life expectan­cies. Some­one in the mid­dle class los­ing a child today is more rare than it was 100 years ago.

The episode was enter­tain­ing, and pro­vid­ed an oppor­tu­ni­ty to see spec­tac­u­lar vis­tas of Bar­ba­dos as well as con­sid­er how var­ied Amer­i­can fam­i­lies are. Ms. Pal­trow was vis­i­bly moved by some of the dis­cov­er­ies. This was a sol­id episode, which would still have been improved with a brief state­ment of the amount of research done to get to these dis­cov­er­ies; how­ev­er, I know that con­tra­dicts with the Ancestry.com mar­ket­ing mes­sage, which can be boiled down to: “This is so easy, even you could do it!”