Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Tuesday's Tip - Use the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors Site

This week's Tuesday's Tip is:  Use the National Park Service's website (http://www.nps.gov/civilwar/index.htm) to search for information about the war, Union and Confederate Soldiers and Sailors, prisoners, regimental histories, and more.

Here is the Home Page for the site:


The tabs at the top of the page (green background) are NPS links for "Find a Park," "Discover History," "Explore Nature," "Get Involved," "Working with Communities," "Teachers," "Kids" and  "About Us."

Down the left side of the screen above are links to the Civil War site, including "Home," "Stories," "People," "Places," "Collections," "Preservation," "Facts," and "150 Years: Maryland campaign."

On the "People" page, there is a l ink for the "Soldiers and Sailors Database" (http://www.nps.gov/civilwar/soldiers-and-sailors-database.html):


A user can search for people who might have served in the War using this database.  There are different search fields for "Soldiers," "Sailors," "Regiments," "Cemeteries," "Battles," Prisoners," "Medals of Honor" and "Monuments."

I chose "Soldiers," and in the search box, I put in Last Name = 'seaver' and selected "Union" as shown below:


The options in the search fields included:  "By Keyword," "By Last Name," "By First Name," "By Side," "By State," "Rank In," "rank Out," and "By Function."

There were 205 Union Soldiers with the last name of Seaver:


I scrolled down until I found Isaac Seaver.  Here is what his screen said:


There was a link to his regiment which provided information about the regiment:


The best use of this site is as a starting point to find further records for your ancestors.  If they aren't included here, then they probably did not serve in the Civil War.  If they are included, then the user should pursue the different records (Service Record, Pension File, etc.).

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/06/tuesdays-tip-use-civil-war-soldiers-and.html

Copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

2 comments:

Cousin Russ said...

Randy,

Just to add one comment about what you posted, don't overlook the make up of the Civil War Unit.

Using the Family (or friends), allies, and Neighbors concept, you may find other's of interest in the same unit.

I have also found, that I can't just look at ONE website for a Civil War ancestor. I have to look at at least 3. This one (Civil War Soldiers and Sailors), but Fold3 and Ancestry.com.

I look for both the ancestor or person of interest, but also the Unit.

Russ

Geolover said...

Randy, thanks for pointing to this site. Unfortunately it is a little less easy to use in searching for soldiers with common names, since the recent search-form revision no longer has a specific field for Regimental number.

However, I found that one can use the "keyword" field for a Regiment's number. Thus, if you know the soldier's surname was "Simpson" who was in 'A' Company, 15th Ohio Infantry, but want to know how exactly his first name and/or initial were listed, you can search for Simpson, Ohio, Infantry, and put "15" in the Keyword box. The search engine recognizes this combination like a charm. Good programming, people!