This March I delivered a short talk for the CelticMKE St. Patrick’s Day at Home Festival. I concentrated on how units such as the Irish Brigade and the 9th Massachusetts celebrated St. Patrick’s Day during the American Civil War, with a focus on the famed events of 1863. Needless to say, some good fun was......
I’m delighted to say that a project myself and Professor David Gleeson of Northumbria University have been working on for quite a while is now live. Last summer we instigated a pilot project with a team of dedicated volunteer transcribers to examine muster rolls of the “City-class” ironclads of the Mississippi Squadron, pas we sought......
When I started this blog back in 2010 I couldn’t have imagined where it would lead, both in terms of the community and friendships that have built up around it, and with respect to my own research. As many of you will be aware, the website–and your support of it–have led me to the publication......
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......
George was born around 1845 in Dingle. He had been enrolled at Lynn, Massachusetts on 3rd December 1863, becoming a private in Company H of the 2nd Massachusetts Heavy Artillery, a unit with a heavy Irish American contingent. At the time he was described as an 18-year-old laborer, who was 5 feet 5 inches tall......
As regular readers will be aware, over the last decade or so my work on Irish pension files from the American Civil War has driven much of the content on this site. Today, those files are gathered together and protected by the National Archives, stored within the “stacks” of the NARA building on Pennsylvania Avenue.......
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 new post comes from regular contributor Brendan Hamilton, who needs no introduction on the site. It brings another insight into Brendan’s fantastic and pioneering research on the boys from the North’s Houses of Refuge who found themselves in Union uniform during the Civil War. On this occasion he takes us through the lives of......
A great many of the men interred at Andersonville National Cemetery died of illnesses associated with starvation and exposure. For those Irish within the camp who had endured the Great Famine, many of the ailments they saw must have seemed brutally familiar. Among them were causes like dropsy, dysentery, diarrhoea. It is a sad irony......
As the new Andersonville Irish Project gathers steam, the site will be sharing stories and information about some of the Irish American men who died there, as well as news on the database and map as they are updated. In the first of these “spotlight” posts, we are taking a look at the man interred......