A Resource About the Civil War

With the high interest in genealogy and history today, people are often interested in the military records of their ancestors who fought in the American Civil War.

One resource available is The Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System , an online database of sailors, soldiers, regiments, and more. One can access information about the men from both the Union and the Confederacy there.

The site there says in part:

• The Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System is a computerized database containing very basic facts about servicemen who served on both sides during the Civil War. The initial focus of the CWSS is the Names Index Project, a project to enter names and other basic information from 6.3 million soldier records in the National Archives. The facts about the soldiers were entered from records that are indexed to many millions of other documents about Union and Confederate Civil War soldiers maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration.
  
  Other information includes: histories of regiments in both the Union and Confederate Armies, links to descriptions of 384 significant battles of the war, and other historical information. Additional information about soldiers, sailors, regiments, and battles, as well as prisoner-of-war records and cemetery records, will be added over time.
  
  The Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System (CWSS) is a cooperative effort by the National Park Service (NPS) and several other public and private partners, to computerize information about the Civil War. The goal of the CWSS is to increase the American people's understanding of this decisive era in American history by making information about it widely accessible. The CWSS will enable the public to make a personal link between themselves and history.

American House Divided--The Civil War

The years 1861-1865 were the trying years of a nation in its adolescence. Traumatic years in which brother strove against brother, and father strove against son. When not only a nation was divided, but the people and the families within that nation were divided as well. Neighbors, friends, and families whom had worked together, lived together, and worshipped together found themselves divided over questions of union and slavery, states rights and central government rights, treason and patriotism. Questions that would only be answered, and difficulties that would only be settled after four long bloody years of war and deprivation that would cost 624,511 American lives. More American lives than were lost in all the wars of the 20th century (World War I-116,516; World War 2- 405,399; Korean War- 43,891; Vietnam War- 58,167) combined.

On this blog we will look at the people that this war affected, both North and South, as well as East and West. They were great figures of historical note, as well as faceless names that wrote letters, kept diaries and journals (where I have used quotations from these sources, the spelling and grammar have been intentionally reproduced as written by their respective writers), and lived and died through this bloody turmoil we know by many names---"The War Between the States"-- "The War Against Northern Aggression"--"The Lost Cause"-- "The Brothers War"--and many more. Those people caught up in this conflict, give us a glimpse into what they felt, what they thought, and what they lived....The American Civil War.