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......
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......