Available for: War of 1812 Mexican-American Early Indian Wars Civil War Spanish-American War Compiled Military Service Records (CMSR) are a collection of each soldier’s military records that were gathered together from a variety of original sources, including muster rolls, hospital records, casualty sheets, etc. The CMSRs are therefore derivative records, compiled in the late 1800s
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.
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 Ancestry.com and Fold3.com instead. In order to access most of the records at Ancestry.com or Fold3.com from your home computer or laptop, however, you’d need to pay a subscription fee. But there are many ways to access them for FREE.
Recent Comments