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Computers & Genealogy - Article #17

by Byron Bray


This month, we continue our exploration of online genealogical databases with an exciting new source of information.

The Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System
The Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System (CWSSS) is a database set up by the National Parks Service to catalog and provide information on each and every soldier and sailor who servde in the Civil War. An undertaking of this magnitude obviously requires a massive amount of time and energy, but the first part of the project is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

First we'll discuss the CWSSS, where to find it, how it works and how to use it. Then I will also cover some other computer-related resources useful in obtaining information on your ancestors who may have participated in the Civil War and the units to which they belonged.

The Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System is a computerized database containing very basic facts about servicemen who served on both sides during the Civil War. It also contains a list of regiments in both the Union and Confederate Armies, identifications and descriptions of 384 significant battles of the war, references that identify the sources of the information in the database and suggestions for where to find additional information. Information is being added constantly.

The facts about the soldiers are being entered from records that are indexed to many millions of other documents about Union and Confederate Civil War soldiers maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration.

You can find this database at:

http://www.itd.nps.gov/cwss/

To understand how it works, you must know one or two basics about how the Civil War records and information was originally recorded and maintained.

During the American Civil War, every two weeks, on average, usually at the company level, soldiers' names were recorded on muster rolls. Beginning in the 1880's General Ainsworth's staff in the Department of the Army indexed these records to determine those soldiers and sailors who were eligible for pensions arising from service in the Civil War.

His staff wrote out a card for every time a soldier's (or sailor's) name appeared on a muster roll. When Ainsworth's staff finished the Compiled Military Service records, each soldier's file usually had many cards, one for each time the soldier's name appeared on a muster roll.

An additional card, the General Index Card listed the soldier's name, the soldier's rank at the time of enlistment from the first card and the date the soldier left the service with the soldier's final rank from the last card.

These General Index cards form the basis for the Civil War Soldiers System.


As of this time, names and information relating to over 236,000 colored soldiers has been added to the database. Additional information about soldiers, sailors, regiments, and battles, as well as prisoner-of-war records and cemetery records is currently being added and will continue to be added over time.

There are approximately 5.4 million Union and Confederate soldier and sailor records to be added. The project is in the process of adding the records of the Union and Confederate soldiers from the Confederate states, which are currently being entered by volunteers from the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

The next set of records to be posted on the internet will be Civil War African American sailors, followed by the records currently being entered by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

The project will also be adding GIS maps of the terrain of the various battlefields and they are developing an enormous inventory of photographic images that they will be adding in the form of a photographic database.

Using the database is quite simple. On the main page, you press the appropriate "Search" button to take you to a search page. There you enter the surname of the soldier/sailor you wish to research and then press the "Enter" key on your keyboard. A list of the names of soldiers/sailors bearing that surname is presented, along with the unit each served in. pressing the soldier or sailor's name pops up the information entered on their General Index Card, including:

Pressing on the name of the unit pops up a brief history of that unit, locations where the unit served, the engagements in which the unit participated, the date the unit was mustered out of service and links to further information.

The CWSS project is the product of a partnership between the National Parks Service and many other organizations. It's most important project, the building of the CWSS Names Index, which will ultimately list the names of all the soldiers who fought in the Civil War, is the result of a partnership between the Parks Service, the Genealogical Society of Utah (Mormon Church) and the Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS).

Other partners include the National Archives, the African American Civil War Memorial Project, Howard University's African American Sailors in the Civil War Navy Research Project, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the U.S. Army Military History Institute, the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War and the United States Civil War Center.


Two More Civil War Sites

There are two more sites which contain a wealth of information on the the soldiers and saiors who fought in the Civil War and Regiments to which they belonged. They are actually both parts of one site, but they have been divided in order to keep them more organized. They are:

http://www.CyndisList.com/cw.htm#Reg-Union

http://www.CyndisList.com/cw.htm#Reg-Confed

As you might expect from the addresses, one of these pages contins links to sites devoted to the Union regiments and the soldiers who belonged to them. The other presents links to similar resources on the Confederate side. Many of these sites are very complete, containing photographs of each of the officers and enlisted men, the histories of both the regimentrs and the records of the men in them, photographs of their battle standards and much more valuable information.


Additional Civil War Information

The original service records of Union and Confederate Civil War Soldiers and the pension records of Union veterans are maintained at the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, where they are available for research to anyone at least age 16. The records exist in their originally created form or on microfilm. You can request searches of those records by using the NATF form 80. To get copies of the form 80, you can send an e-mail to:

inquire@arch2.nara.gov

Be sure to include your postal mailing address requesting however many form 80s you need. You will receive the form(s) you need most quickly if you include the word "form" in your message. That word generates an automatic e-mail response to confirm receipt of your request and that provides information about other forms of use to genealogists.

The military service records and pension files are separate series of records and must be requested on separate form 80s. For example, if you need both the service record and the pension file for one particular veteran who fought for the Union, you need to complete two NATF Form 80s, one for each request.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) does not have custody of Confederate soldier pension files. For additional information regarding Confederate pension files, you must contact the State Archives for the state from which the veteran served.

For a successful search of the records, certain specific information is required, including: Full name, state in which he served, and branch of military. You must also indicate the side on which he fought, Union or Confederate.

If a file is found for the veteran in question, NARA will supply copies of documents that provide pertinent information about the veteran and his family. Instructions on the NATF Form 80 explain the payment procedure for copies.

The form 80 is also available by requesting it through the following address:

The National Park Service recommends reading Bertram Hawthorne Groene's "Tracing Your Civil War Ancestor" (Winston-Salem, N.C.: John F. Blair, 1973), as an easy-to-read guide to sources of information on Civil War soldiers.

Next month, we'll be covering one of the most exciting new developments in the world of Internet databases; the creation of the new Ellis Island Immigrant Arrival Records database, which I am sure will be of interest to nearly every genealogical researcher with European roots. Unti then,

Good Hunting!


© 1998 by Byron C. Bray. This, and all "Computers and Genealogy" articles, are copyright Byron C. Bray and may be copied for personal use but may NOT be reprinted without the permission of the author. Contact: byron.bray@cmug.com