The following is an excerpt from the current issue of Family Chronicle...

Researching Civil War Ancestors

David A. Norris looks at lesser-known battles and skirmishes to uncover records

When you follow the footsteps of a Civil War ancestor who fought at Gettysburg, you have your choice of hundreds of books and countless newspaper and magazine articles to help your research. Many books focus on a single day or some other specialized aspect of the three-day battle. Shiloh, Chancellorsville and the other major battles also have hundreds of sources loaded with information. Things will be quite a bit different for you, though, if you try to learn about what your ancestors went through when they fought at Devil’s Backbone (Arkansas), Cricket Hill (Virginia), Bean’s Station (Tennessee) or one of the many other lesser-known battles of the war.

The Civil War Sites Advisory Commission estimated that there were 10,500 “armed conflicts” during the Civil War, from the great battles down to small skirmishes. Battles took place between the firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston on 12 April 1861 to the Battle of Palmito Ranch, Texas, on 12-13 May 1865. The 384 “principal battles” occurred in 26 states, and there were minor raids and actions scattered from Arizona to Vermont. Many skirmishes had no more than one casualty, and some actions ended with none killed or wounded.

Large battles were obviously important in shaping the history of the war, but the experiences that soldiers went through during the war’s vast number of small clashes and skirmishes were more typical of the day-to-day story of army life.

For the lesser-known battles, there are many places to turn for further information. The best place to look for thorough accounts of all military actions during the war is The War of the Rebellion: the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (better known as the Official Records). This 128-volume set was completed in 1901 after two decades of work by US War Department clerks. Documents, battlefield dispatches, after-action reports, telegrams and other papers are arranged chronologically and by region.

Material is divided between “reports”, which concentrate on specific battles, movements and campaigns, and “correspondence”, which may cover inspection reports, administrative matters, supplies, medicine and hospitals, black marketing and smuggling, information from scouts and spies, or anything else that pertained to the war.

Officers were supposed to file reports on battles, skirmishes, raids and expeditions, but they were often months behind if they were in the midst of a busy season of campaigning. Some officers were killed in action before finishing their reports on earlier battles. Other records are missing, especially many Confederate records which were destroyed in the fires that swept Richmond at the end of the war.
Officers are mentioned much more often than enlisted men, whose names are most likely to appear in the Official Records if they were casualties of a small skirmish (casualty lists in a major battle were so long that they do not appear in most after-action reports), performed a heroic act such as capturing an enemy flag, or committed an offense such as deserting to the enemy.

One thing to keep in mind: “casualties” include not only those who were killed, but the wounded, captured, and missing as well. Misunderstanding this concept leads to many erroneous statements such as “50,000 soldiers were killed at Gettysburg”. That large figure represents all casualties, while the number of soldiers killed in action was closer to 7,000. Many missing Civil War soldiers (and some who were listed as deserters) were captured, but the realities of their fates were unknown to their regiments for months, if not for the rest of the war...

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