Perhaps the greatest value of the Widow’s and Dependent Pension Files is in what they can tell us about the lives of female Irish emigrants in the 19th century. There is surely no other source that provides the same level of detail on Irishwomen in this period, particularly with respect to those who had fallen…

I am fascinating by the physical remnants of the past that survive in the contemporary landscape. When we think of landscapes of the American Civil War, the images conjured in our minds are often of vast battlefields, such as the monument encrusted fields and hills of Gettysburg. But they also encompass many other areas– places like…

Many of you will be familiar with the Civil War Monitor, one of the leading magazines focusing on the American Civil War. In each issue they run a two-page infographic feature entitled “Figures”. For their Summer 2020 edition I teamed up with the Monitor’s graphics team to explore the widows and dependents of Civil War…

As part of the teaching process with Masters students in University College Cork’s Digital Arts and Humanities Programme I have been exploring the world of infographics and their potential to communicate information in an attractive and easy to digest manner. For those of us without substantial graphic design or software skills there are a number…

The Andersonville Irish Project is continuing apace, and there has also been some good news in terms of funding recently. I am delighted that Andersonville National Historic Site has awarded the Project a POW Research Grant, a fund made available thanks to the generosity of the Friends of Andersonville. In the months to come, as…

Last week we brought you the big news of the upcoming 19th October event at the Andersonville National Historic Site, when a plaque will be unveiled to commemorate the Irish American dead of Andersonville and their families (more on that here). To mark the occasion we have prepared two new project infographics, each of which…

Earlier this week, to mark the major upcoming Irish event at Andersonville National Historic Site we shared the first of our new project infographics, which explored the demographics of the first 850 men we have identified. You can check that out here. Now we are sharing the second infographic, which more closely examines the service…

The latest update to the Andersonville Irish project has just been uploaded. The database now contains the details of 225 Irish Americans who lost their lives at the Prison Camp- you can access it on the project page here. The interactive Ireland map has also had numerous additions, something which you can explore via the…

The Andersonville Irish Project has now recorded details of 350 Irish Americans who perished at Andersonville during 1864 and 1865. To mark that milestone we have produced an infographic (below, click on the image to enlarge) highlighting some of the main details we have gathered to date. Thanks to the Irish Consulate General of Atlanta,…

As regular readers will be aware we are pretty fond of a map here on Irish in the American Civil War. One of our previous initiatives was the Mapping Donegal Veterans project, which plotted American Civil War links to that county onto an interactive map. It generated a lot of online and media interest, and…

The Irish Brigade is rightly regarded as one of the finest units to take the field during the American Civil War. However, just like all other Union formations, they had their ups and down in battle, and like other formations, they suffered from desertion. In order to examine this in further detail I have taken the…

I am delighted to formally launch my Donegal in the American Civil War Map. It combines research I have gathered over the past decade together with public contributions I have received over recent weeks, and now amounts to almost 200 entries. This map represents the most detailed attempt to plot American Civil War veterans’ place…

As regular readers will be aware, Andersonville Prison and Andersonville National Cemetery are regularly featured on this site. It is almost certainly the National Cemetery that contains more Irish American dead from the Civil War than any other in the United States. I have been working towards establishing a formal project examining the Irish and…

The last post looked at the nativity of soldiers in the 23rd Illinois Infantry, based on analysis of records pertaining to 1,585 of its men. The place of birth for 1,270 had been noted; of these 682 were from Ireland. Where were these Irishmen from? How many Irish counties were represented? Were any concentrations discernible? In…

This is the first in a new series which I have been planning to embark upon for a number of years. The intent is to attempt to explore the scale and range of immigrant service during the Civil War through the medium of a single battlefield. Periodically over the course of the coming months (and…

I was recently invited by H-CivWar– H-Net’s network on scholarship, teaching, and outreach on the history of the American Civil War– to discuss my website and some of the resources and projects on it for their Civil War Era & Digital Humanities Interview Series. I had a really enjoyable time chatting through some of the…

This is the second instalment of the ongoing mapping project detailing every widow and dependent parent in the world outside of the United States receiving a pension in 1883, and concentrates on Britain (you can see the first, looking at Mainland Europe, and learn more about the project here). In order to explore the maps, click on the…

This project represents one of the most extensive resources yet made available on the site. Having examined in excess of 11,000 entries for Confederate veterans living in Alabama in 1907, I extracted the details on those men of Irish birth. I then combined it with analysis of the Irishmen’s service records and pension applications, creating…

I have been experimenting recently with different ways of visualizing the impact of the American Civil War. I am interested in how we can combine data recorded in the 19th century with some of the new digital tools available, in an effort to find new ways of engaging with this history and potentially reveal further…

Over recent months I have been working on a major new resource for those interested in the emigrant experience of the American Civil War. It seeks to provide information on all the widows and dependents receiving American pensions outside the United States, based on those listed in the 1883 List of Pensioners on the Roll. The…