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 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...

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 Civil War world has been captivated in recent weeks by the identification of a previously overlooked burial map of the Antietam battlefield, prepared by Simon G. Elliot in 1864. The staff of New York Public Library first recognised the...

As regular readers will be aware, Andersonville Prison and Andersonville National Cemetery are regularly featured on this site. It is almost certainly the National Cemetery that contains more Irish American dead from the Civil War than any other in the...

Regular contributor Brendan Hamilton returns with more utterly fascinating research from his project examining underprivileged boys from the North’s juvenile justice system who found themselves in Union service during the American Civil War. You can catch Brendan’s previous post on...

Like many I have had a number of events cancelled or postponed due to the pandemic. One talk that fell victim was for the Kilrush and District Historical Society, where I had hoped to discuss stories of local men and...

One battlefield. One regiment. Three bodies. Three families. A story of Step Migration, Chain Migration, and Americanisation- and of the Kerry diaspora in Ireland, Canada and America. As the last wisps of lingering gunsmoke departed the woods and ravines of...