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
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,
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,
The question of whether there were black soldiers in the Confederate Army is one of the most heated subjects on Civil War blogs and social media sites. Some claim that that there were as many as 90,000 black soldiers in the Confederate army prior to 1865. This claim, supported by a few posed photos
A recent post by Randy Drais in his excellent Battle of Gettysburg Buff e-newsletter (randydrais@gmail.com) mentioned that he found my transcription of the 1860 Federal Census of Gettysburg to be useful. This blog also had two posts (here and here) in which I analyzed that census with respect to age, sex, race, occupation, place of birth,
Of the 5369 Union soldiers that were reported “missing or captured” at the Battle of Gettysburg[1], most of the captured were processed through Libby Prison in Richmond and then Belle Island on the James River. At least 303 of them eventually found themselves at the notorious Andersonville Prison in Georgia. The Andersonville records are incomplete,
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
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