As I am on a brief visit back to my former home of Midleton, Co. Cork at present, I thought for our next post we might take a look at some work I have undertaken on local men who served...
Earlier this year Damian presented an online lecture for Armagh City, Banbridge & Craigavon Borough Council as part of their Rippling Effects of The Great Irish Famine Series. The talk primarily explored the stories of emigrants from around the local...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...