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...
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...
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...
During my research I have repeatedly encountered the consequences of the 1866 Cholera epidemic that swept through the U.S. Army. By the time it was over, the military had suffered almost as many deaths as were experienced in the entire...
The men who entered the Union military as substitutes from 1863 onwards are among the most neglected and maligned groups associated with the American Civil War. History–and many historians–have overwhelmingly focused on the negative aspects of their service, highlighting their...
Among the most intriguing stories of widows and dependents in the Atlantic World are those of the African Americans who moved into Canada having escaped the shackles of slavery. In 1883, one of them was Priscilla Atwood. She made her...
A number of previous posts have explored the impact of loss during the American Civil War on ordinary people in Europe (See Mapping Mainland Europe’s American Civil War Widows). Many of them had never–and would never–set foot in the United...
The new Forgotten Irish Podcast is now live. It is a story that may be familiar to some of you, that of Catherine Garvin and her son Con, which also features as the first chapter of my latest book. In late 1863, details...
When the American Civil War broke out in April 1861, Ireland’s Nation newspaper predicted that the lives of Irish emigrants would be “offered in thousands. Many a mother’s heart in Ireland, long cheered by the affectionate and dutiful letter and the generous...