Researching Civil War Ancestors, Part II: What Was Your Ancestor’s Military Unit?

This is Part II of a series on finding and researching your Civil War ancestors. See “Part I: Did Any of Your Ancestors Fight?” here.

Once you have set aside ancestors of yours who are likely to have fought in the Civil War, the next step is to discover their military unit. When you have this information, you have the key to a treasure trove of documents, letters, and stories related to their service. So how do you do it?

I will use my ancestor, Robert H Tucker, as an example. I know from searching the 1860 US Federal Census that Robert lived in Lawrence County, Alabama in that year. Additionally, Robert married in the same county in 1866, right after the war was over. Based on this, I can make an educated guess that Robert, if he served in the war, probably would have signed up to serve in a unit made up of men from this area. This is a very common pattern of Civil War service for both Confederates and Union soldiers.

With all of this in mind, I will start by looking for a Robert Tucker from Alabama in Civil War military service records. These records can be found at FamilySearch.org, Ancestry.com, or Fold3.com. Since FamilySearch.org is free to everyone, I will run their search as an example. The principles I discuss here, however, apply to searches on any of the above-named sites.

Here, I’ve run a search for all Robert Tuckers serving in Alabama units in FamilySearch’s United States Civil War Soldiers Index:

As you can see, the search comes up with four different Robert Tuckers, all serving in Alabama regiments. One of them, I see right away, has the right middle initial: “H.” Let’s click on him:

This gives me more information, including the soldier’s military unit: 16th Alabama Infantry, Company B. Most units like these were made up of men from the same county, or men from a set of neighboring counties. Knowing this, I’ll look up the 16th Alabama Infantry, Company B. We’ll see if it contains men from Lawrence County, where my ancestor lived. Many websites contain this information. One especially good one is the FamilySearch wiki:

As you can see, this unit consisted of men from Lawrence County. It looks like we’ve got our guy!

We can’t be certain, though, until we verify this through further research. “Robert Tucker” is a pretty common name, and it’s possible he enlisted in a different town, or even in a different state! This is not unheard of in Civil War records. I’ll cover more of that in Part III of this series. If you have any questions about finding your Civil War ancestors and their stories, comment below, or message us on our Facebook page. You never know what you will find.

Lastly, for those interested, we at The Handwritten Past offer professional genealogy research services to uncover your Civil War ancestors and their war stories. We have extensive experience with both Union and Confederate research. To hire us and get a free price quote, contact us on our blog or via Facebook.