The following announcement was sent to Olive Tree Genealogy by Fold3
. If you're looking for a Union Soldier this may be what you've been waiting for!
Index to Compiled Service Records of Union Soldiers
Fold3 is excited to announce the expansion of the Civil War Collection by adding the Index to Compiled Service Records of Union Soldiers. The first four states available in this collection are Ohio, New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.
Each index card
gives the name of a soldier, his rank, and the unit in which he served.
Anyone looking for a Union soldier in the Civil War will find these
cards useful in identifying the state and regiment in which a man served
and how his name appears in the military records. You can then locate
his records to learn about his service in the war and the battles in
which his regiment fought.
Beginning in 1890, Capt. Fred C. Ainsworth, head of the Record and
Pension Division of the War Department, spearheaded an effort to create
card abstracts of information from muster rolls, regimental returns,
descriptive books, and other military records to build a compiled
service record for each Union soldier. The index cards reference the
resulting Civil War Service Records, many of which are also available on Fold3. As an example, the index card for Timothy Canty tells us that he served as a private and an artificer in Company A of the 1st New York Engineers. We can then find Canty's service record as the 1st New York Engineers is one of regiments digitized on Fold3.
This new index, viewed as card images on Fold3, may be familiar to some.
The National Park Service transcribed these cards, referred to as
"General Index Cards," and placed the data online in its Civil War
Soldiers and Sailors System. When searching for a soldier there, you are
provided with a transcription, while Fold3's images allow users to view
the original card as well as determine the accuracy of the
transcription. Once you find the soldier you're looking for, you can
connect his index card to his service record on Fold3, or contact NARA
for copies of his documents.
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