How to Research Your Civil War Ancestor
The American Civil War was fought from 1861 to 1865 and the average soldier was 18-45 years old. So if you have a white, male ancestor who was born between roughly 1816 and 1847 and lived in the United States in the early 1860s, then he probably played some part in the Civil War.
Free Access to Ancestry.com and Fold3.com
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
List of the First 100
In June, 1864, fifty Union prisoners of war, all officers, were held in the besieged city of Charleston, South Carolina within range of the Federal guns in an effort to discourage further bombardment of the city. Although they were eventually exchanged for 50 Confederate officers of similar rank, the use of these POWs as human
List of the Immortal 600 Captured at Gettysburg
For the benefit of Gettysburg researchers, the following is a subset of the full list of the “Immortal 600” showing only those who were captured at Gettysburg. For the story of the Immortal 600, see this blog post. ALEXANDER, Capt. William J. Co. A, 37th North Carolina Infantry res. Wilkesboro, North Carolina; captured at Gettysburg,
The Immortal 600 at Gettysburg
Most of the approximately 5,000 Confederate prisoners who were captured at Gettysburg, including Brigadier General James J. Archer, were sent to Fort Delaware on Pea Patch Island, just south of Wilmington in the middle of the Delaware River. Some of those prisoners would eventually be sent to prisons at Point Lookout (MD), Elmira (NY), or,
