All posts by: irishacw
Very occasionally Irish American pension files contain beautiful documents that were created as a record of the family’s origins and growth (for a previous examination of one, see here). The adoption of Family Registers to note down births, marriages and...
Over the years I have come to realise how extremely rare it is to be able to identify precisely where in Ireland ordinary American Civil War servicemen originated. There are only a handful of times where sufficient information has survived...
Though we tend not to associate Dublin with large-scale nineteenth century emigration, many thousands of people departed the city and county in the years before the American Civil War. Substantial numbers lost their lives during the conflict, as the widows...
On 14 August last I gave an online presentation to the Kenosha Civil War Museum in Wisconsin on the topic of the letters written by Irishmen who served in Midwest units during the American Civil War. Some of the research...
Over the years the site has featured a number of posts about the tattoos and marks on the bodies of Irish American men, such as Marked Men: The Tattoos of New York Irishmen, 1863; Inked Irishmen: Irish Tattoos in 1860s...
John Dineen was born in Cork around 1846. Somtime during the 1850s he emigrated with his parents to Lawrence, Massachusetts, a town which provided employment to large numbers of Irish immigrants in its textile mills. On 5th June 1862, when...
On 17th June 1862 a Confederate shell arced through the sky from a battery positioned atop the Saint Charles bluffs on the White River, Arkansas. As it plunged donwards into the Union ironclad USS Mound City, it ruptured her steam...
Earlier this month I gave an online talk for Trasna na Tíre on the Irish in the American Civil War. It discusses the level and form of Irish involvement, the reasons behind their service, and the impact on Irish people...
A great strength of letters drawn from the widows and dependent pension files is the openness of their content on social and familial issues. With letter collections passed down through families or donated to major repositories, we always have to...
The citations that accompanied Civil War era Medal of Honor awards tend to provide us with precious little detail. Regularly restricted to one or two lines, they often lack description, and do little to transmit the horrors of the sights...