behind AotW

An excellent companion to Moore’s Roster for researching North Carolina troops is the 5 Volume Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina in the Great War, 1861-1865, published by the State of North Carolina in 1901. Editor Walter Clark was Adjutant of the 35th Regiment at Sharpsburg, and later Lieutenant Colonel of the 70th Regiment.

All NC military units – along with an array of related subjects – are represented in one or more articles, and each piece is written by a veteran who served in the regiment, battalion, or battery. Their works range from brief essays to fairly sophisticated unit histories. As a bonus, most include selections of war-period photographs of officers and men.  There are hundreds of faces altogether across the volumes.

These volumes are available online from both GoogleBooks and the Internet Archive (IA) Collection.  I like the IA image quality and paging interface best, so a hyperlinked table of contents (hyperTOC) for that online edition follows …

I’ve been on a fruitful run over the last couple of weeks looking into North Carolina soldiers who were at the battle of Sharpsburg. It began with the following haunting photograph from the Time-Life Voices volume on the battle of Fredericksburg …

W.B. Whitaker (Time-Life’s Voices: Fredericksburg, courtesy Frances Honeycutt)

He’s First Sergeant – later Captain – William Benjamin Whitaker of Henderson County, North Carolina. Last week saw the anniversary of his death at Fredericksburg, Virginia in 1862. He’d enlisted in Company I of the 16th Infantry in May 1861 and was promoted Captain in April 1862.

Looking into him, I found two extensive works online about North Carolina State Troops in the War.  I’ll assemble hyperlinked tables of contents (hyperTOCs) for each to save a little time on future research.

First – in this post – an old standby reference work:  Moore’s Roster. Next time, Walter Clark’s Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions…

One of the most moving experiences you can have anywhere is driving through the battlefield during the annual Antietam Memorial Illumination.  This year the tradition returns on Saturday, December 5th to the Antietam National Battlefield, Sharpsburg, Maryland.

On that evening, volunteers will light over 23,000 luminaries – candles in small paper bags – distributed across the Park to represent each of the soldiers who were casualties on that ground on 17 September 1862.

New AotW member Tim Dicke has sent us some of his photographs from last year’s event.  It can be tricky to capture any kind of image of those little flickering lights, but Tim has done a fine job of illustrating something of what it’s like at the Illumination.

Vermont Brigade Cannon

The end of an era.

Yahoo! GeoCities, our free web site building service and community,
is closing on October 26, 2009.

Your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web

After years of playing with Antietam battle information and biography on paper, then in spreadsheets and text files, I started putting it online in 1992. I had an email account with a community organization and a little FTP space on their server. The Gopher service was my friend.

When I learned about web browsing and hypertext, I saw before me the holy grail. Finally – an effective way to tie all the people and event threads together. I did a little poking about and found GeoCities’ free hosting.  The price was attractive, so I opened Antietam on the Web there in November 1996…