Thursday, April 7, 2011

Free Ancestry Civil War Databases

Have you heard about the FREE access that Ancestry is offering to their Civil War databases this week? The offer is good from today (April 7th) until next Thursday (April 14th). What's even better is that they've added a number of NEW resources. Here's a link to the list of CW resources now available to everyone: http://www.ancestry.com/civilwar_sub?flash=true&o_iid=47474&o_lid=47474
In addition, Footnote.com is offering free access to their Civil War records, too. Such a deal!
I spent a little time this afternoon playing with the "Civil War Draft Registration Records, 1863-1865" on Ancestry. They're organized by state (Union only), then Congressional District. After searching for a few of my Missouri names and finding nothing, I discovered that you don't have to put a name (of any kind) in the search box. I just put "Hickory County, Missouri" in the "Lived In" box on the left. Amazingly, I got quite a nice alphabetized list of all the men included in this county. Since so many of my family names are often horrendously misspelled, finding them by searching for my surnames is almost impossible. This way of searching led me to all the men in the county. Also interesting is that these records INCLUDE men who already served, with notations as to unit and length of service.
If you find other cool info in these free resources, please leave a comment.

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