A fairly typical example of the kind of confusion you often find in Civil War records is this card for Sergeant David M Martendale, Company A, 4th Texas Infantry from his Compiled Service Records. It was transcribed from Frederick hospital records, and it’s not hard to image how the medical staff heard his name as Martin Dale.

There again is that marvelous term “Vuln Sclopet”, short for the neo-Latin Vulnus Sclopetarium – gunshot wound.

Sergeant Martendale had been mortally wounded at Sharpsburg on 17 September, and died in a Richmond hospital on 12 December 1862.

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