African American Civil War Soldiers

Abstract

The African American Civil War Soldiers transcription project represents a highly laudable effort to apply the power of crowdsourcing to digitizing the military records of black Union soldiers from the American Civil War. Specifically, this project seeks to digitize and make available via the Web the Compiled Military Service Records (CMSR) of African American troops of this conflict, which are located at the main National Archives building in downtown Washington, D.C. They are part of the larger collection of carded service records for Union soldiers in the Civil War. During the late nineteenth century, in an effort to meet numerous requests for service information on particular soldiers coming from the U.S. Pension Bureau and other parts of the federal government, the War Department had transcribed by an army of clerks onto sturdy cards that were then consolidated into personalized files, service information on federal troops in the Civil War from muster rolls, regimental returns, and other collectively organized records that had become increasingly worn and fragile from repeated consultation since the 1860s. During the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, the CMSRs for black Union soldiers were microfilmed by the National Archives, which was later joined in this endeavor by the private genealogical provider, Fold3.