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!

The 46th Annual Gettysburg Battlefield Preservation Association Civil War Artifact and Collectibles Show in Gettysburg yesterday was the setting for a unique reunion.  For probably the first time in 81 years, the three known surviving examples of the Commissioner’s badge for the 1938 Gettysburg reunion were in the same room. On the left is the

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