As regular readers of the site will know, I have spent many (maybe too many!) years studying the Widows and Dependents pension files of Irish immigrants. For successful applicants, the most important document they possessed was their Pension Certificate, the...
Patrick Coffey was a labourer in his 30s when he went to war. In the summer of 1861, he marched off to Virginia as part of Company D, the “Fitzgerald Guard” of the famed 69th New York State Militia. Like...
The return of the Witnesses to History series sees long-time friend of the site Gary Chiaramonte share news of a new acquisition by the The American Military Heritage Museum of North Carolina. Gary has spent many years researching and collecting...
In the first of what I hope will become a series of posts about Irish Americans who were executed during their Civil War military service, we take a look at documents relating to the story of Private Robert Kerr, an...
Within the files of Irish Americans who died during the American Civil War, certain engagements crop up again and again. As a general rule, the very worst battlefields of the war for Irish Americans were those that took the greatest...
In March I had the opportunity to speak to the Irish American Heritage Museum in Albany, New York, about some of my latest research. The talk focused on the experience of Irish Americans around New York’s Capital Region during 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...
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...