I’m pleased to let readers know of the official launch the Andersonville Irish Project here on Irish in the American Civil War. We’re seeking public help to ID Irish interred at Andersonville, the cemetery that likely contains more Irish casualties from the American Civil War than any other. I’ve teamed up with Nicholas Allen, Director......
Sinead O’Connor has called Paddy’s Lament the “best anti-war song ever made”. Along with the 2002 blockbuster Gangs of New York, this evocative and powerful ballad has arguably had more influence on popular perceptions of Irish involvement in the American Civil War than anything else in recent decades. As someone who works on Irish participation......
I had great fun last week rejoining the guys from the National Museum of Civil War Medicine for one of their lunchtime talks. This time the topic was international pensioners of the American Civil War, where we took a particular focus on some of the working-class widows I have been exploring in my Widows in......
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 deaths seems to have been something that immigrants did after their arrival in the United......
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 that enables us to zoom into the very field or house that these men and......
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 and dependent pension files attest. The Dubliners I come across had often made their homes......
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 I shared in it was being aired for the first time. The guys at the......
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 New York and Scarred Men: The Disfigurements of New York Irishmen, 1863. Now regular guest......
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 only 16-years-old, John left his position as an operative to enlist in what became Company......
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 chest, precipitating an event which was every Civil War sailor’s worst nightmare. There were few......