Compiled Military Service Records (CMSRs) for Confederate soldiers are online, but many of the images are so faint that they are unreadable. In other cases, some pages seem to be missing from those online records. In either case, there is a solution that is not well known.
All surviving Confederate CMSRs were digitized by Fold3 (a subscription site) about 15 years ago and, under their agreement with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), many (but not all*) of those records are now available at no charge on NARA’s own site. But Fold3 scanned the records from microfilm, so those that are available to the public are third-generation images. As a result, we often find unreadable records like this:
A card from an online Confederate CMSR.
This is a page from the CMSR of Private Nathan L. Hall of Company E, 4th Florida Infantry. Every online page of his service record is similarly unreadable. In fact, almost every page of every soldier in the 4th Florida Infantry is unreadable online. And the same is true of several other Florida regiments and some regiments from other states.
You can manipulate the brightness and contrast and even invert it to make a negative image, but it doesn’t get much more readable. Unfortunately, NARA’s stated policy is that if a scanned record is on Fold3’s website or their own site, researchers can no longer get access to the original. So the general impression is that interested researchers are just out of luck. But that’s not true!
Prompted by a question on CivilWarTalk.com, we inquired at NARA in Washington D.C. about the service record sampled above and discovered that the originals are available for personal inspection under circumstances like this. That is, if (and only if) the online image is unreadable or demonstrably incomplete, then the original will be made available at NARA. So we were able to scan this soldier’s CMSR for the researcher.
In investigating this issue, we examined the microfilm copy from which Fold3 produced its scan. The image on microfilm was certainly not ideal – but scanning from that microfilm only made the issue much, much worse. By eliminating the microfilm and scanning from the original paper document, the difference was striking.
Quite a difference, huh?
The problem is even worse, however. We found that there is a document in this soldier’s original CMSR file that is not online at all! In fact, it is not on NARA’s microfilmed copy either:
You may be shocked to learn that some documents are missing altogether from the online Confederate CMSRs on which we have relied for many years. If the images of the existing pages are legible, however, you can get access to the paper originals only if you can show evidence that one or more documents are missing from the online version. But how can you show evidence that something is missing??
Some such evidence might be found on the jacket (i.e., the first page) of the CMSR.
- The itemized list of numbers represents the individual cards within the folder. The file in this example should contain at least seven cards.
- Two lines typically say “Number of medical cards herein” and “Number of personal papers herein.” The faint numbers that are written in those two places should match the number of full-sized documents (i.e., not cards) in the file.
- The file will sometimes also contain an envelope, the front of which itemizes those “medical cards” or “personal papers” by type with the sum of those “Inclosures” noted at the top.
If any of these numbers is larger than the number of documents of that type that you find in the file, then you can make a good argument that something is missing from the file and thereby get permission to look at the original at NARA.
[Note: a single document in the online file may be represented by two images: one of the front and one of the back.]
Our order form doesn’t typically allow you to order copies of Confederate CMSRs since they aren’t typically accessible at NARA. But if you can articulate one of the good reasons described above to get access to the original, we would be happy to plead your case at NARA and copy the complete file for you for our regular price of $20 per CMSR ($18 with a free membership to our site). Use this special link to order such a file.
Lastly, although not technically “missing” from the online file, it is worth noting that any “book mark” that is listed at the bottom of a soldier’s CMSR jacket (Union or Confederate) is a reference to another file. 
Those “book mark” files may be several pages or hundreds of pages that relate to that soldier – but book mark files are not on Fold3 or NARA’s website. They can be obtained only in person at NARA in D.C.
If you order a CMSR from Gopher Records, any such book mark files are automatically included at no extra charge. If you find an online CMSR with a book mark, we’d be happy to copy that book mark file at no charge too – as long as you include it with an order for any paid record.
*Confederate service records that are not (yet) available on NARA’s site can be seen only on Fold3. The same is true, of course, for many other types of records on Fold3. Although Fold3 is a subscription site, there are a variety of legal ways to access those records without a subscription as described on our earlier blog post HERE.
