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 citations that accompanied Civil War era Medal of Honor awards tend to provide us with precious little detail. Regularly restricted to one or two lines, they often lack description, and do little to transmit the horrors of the sights...

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...

The latest in the Storied Tombstones series looks at some of the Irish American graves I encountered during my brief visit to Gettysburg National Cemetery. As regular readers will be aware, the premise behind the series revolves around photographs I...

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...

Many of you will be familiar with the Civil War Monitor, one of the leading magazines focusing on the American Civil War. In each issue they run a two-page infographic feature entitled “Figures”. For their Summer 2020 edition I teamed...