Lynn Clarke
iowatex@msn.com<mailto:iowatex@msn.com>
----- Original Message -----
From: Toniacita@aol.com<mailto:Toniacita@aol.com>
To: ILPIKE-L@rootsweb.com<mailto:ILPIKE-L@rootsweb.com>
Sent: Monday, October 04, 2004 9:24 AM
Subject: [ILPIKE] New online Civil War database
This was in the Chicago Sun-Times today:
Database lists Civil War soldiers all in one place
October 4, 2004
Civil War buffs, historians and people adding branches to their family trees
can now go to a single source to find service records of 6.3 million Union
and Confederate soldiers.
Completion of a database called the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System was
announced last week at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., by the National
Park Service.
"Never in one place could one get this information so easily," spokesman
Gerry Gaumer said.
Volunteers from the Mormon Church, Federation of Genealogical Societies and
United Daughters of the Confederacy did the monumental task of assembling
information from disparate sources and entering it at _www.civilwar.nps.gov_
(
http://www.civilwar.nps.gov<http://www.civilwar.nps.gov/>) .
"It's like a concordance to the Scriptures," said Jerry Kowalski, president
of the Chicago Civil War Round Table. "This will be one of the best tools
available for people studying their own lineage and genealogy."
Gail Santroch, president of the Chicago Genealogical Society, said, "It saves
you the trouble of going to the National Archives and looking on the
microfilm."
"This is wonderfully valuable," said Theodore Karamanski, a Civil War expert
at Loyola University Chicago. "The service record is the first thing you look
at."
Karamanski tapped into a listing of Medal of Honor winners and within seconds
turned up local hero Cpl. James Warden of Lemont, who on May 22, 1863, at
Vicksburg displayed "gallantry in the charge of the volunteer storming party."
Among Illinois' 24 other Medal of Honor winners was one Wellis H. Blodgett of
Downers Grove. On Sept. 30, 1862, in Newtonia, Mo., the lieutenant "with a
single orderly, captured an armed picket of eight men and marched them in [as]
prisoners."
The database lists 370,624 Union soldiers from Illinois, exceeded only by the
then-much more populous states of New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Historians generally accept 3.5 million as the number who served in the War
Between the States. Why does the database contain 6.3 million soldiers?
"There are duplicates, mostly because of men who served in more than one unit
and name-spelling variations," said John Peterson of the National Park
Service. The service manages 13 national cemeteries related to Civil War
battlegrounds.
Thousands of names of sailors remain to be added. Graduate students at Howard
University in the nation's capital are pulling them together now.
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