Find Your Civil War Ancestors

I don’t know if any of us know where the idea started. Maybe it began when the Society of North Carolina Archivists announced that the 2010 North Carolina Archives Week theme would be genealogy. At that time the Archives Civil War 150 Committee was thinking about a possible online exhibit to help make the public aware that the American Civil War Sesquicentennial commemoration would be beginning in North Carolina soon. But however it happened, the idea evolved into this site – a relatively informal online exhibit created by the Archives Civil War 150 committee on how each of us found our Civil War ancestors. The committee itself is made up of a small group of staff members from the Archives and Records Section (also known as the State Archives of North Carolina and the Government Records Center). Some of the committee members are Civil War history experts while others of us are not; some of us have a great deal of experience with genealogy, while some members are new to researching family history. We felt it was important to reflect our variety of backgrounds in this exhibit, so each section will have a different feel and focus depending on the interests and experiences of the person writing it. The author of each section will be listed in parenthesis () after the title of the section. Our hope is that by sharing our experiences here we can encourage others, regardless of their level of genealogical research or Civil War history knowledge, to begin learning about their family history, the history of North Carolina, and what resources our institutions can provide.

Exhibit Sections:

  1. A Many Faceted Gemstone: Our North Carolina Union Civil War Ancestors (Chris)
  2. A Many Faceted Gemstone: Our North Carolina Confederate Civil War Ancestors (Chris) – includes the Origin of the Bell Battery.
  3. Wright Stephen Batchelor, A Soldier of Two Sides (Debbi)
  4. Massey and Brown; or, How Even Non-History Types Can Research Their Civil War Relatives (Ashley)
  5. Edward Featherston Small: Beaufort County Soldier (Andrea) – includes the Disability Certificate Report for Edward Featherston Small
  6. Private Robert Williams: Company F, 14th Regiment, North Carolina Troops, CSA (Sion)
  7. George Washington Brown: The Ancestor Who Did Not Want To Be Found (Bill)
  8. From Tombstone to Ancestry: Jacob Spellman (Chris)
  9. Thomas Hatten Langley: The Ancestor I Didn’t Know I Had (Tiffanie)
  10. Hollands from the Highlands: The Civil War Saga of Mathias Holland and His Brothers (Mark)