The U.S. Bureau of Pensions was in a bind. They were unable to verify–or even approximate–the age of one Richard Ewing, a 21-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps who previously served two years in the 25th New York Volunteer...
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...
One of the aims of the Andersonville Irish Project is to use the men identified within the National Cemetery as a vehicle for exploring the wider social story of 1860s Irish America. Just such an opportunity surrounds the case of...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...