behind AotW

I’ve been spending more time than I used to with each soldier I enter into the database, so it’s taken almost two years to add the last thousand. There are now just over 21,000 people-pages on Antietam on the Web.

The latest additions are from the 5th Alabama Infantry, who suffered more than 150 casualties in Maryland, notably at Turner’s Gap on South Mountain on 14 September 1862, where most of three Companies were killed or captured.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Antietam on the Web (AotW).

My work online about the battle began in 1992 with a collection of text files, but I consider the birthday of AotW to be 1 November 1996 when I first launched the website.

That first site on a free service called GeoCities consisted of 3 simple battlefield maps, profiles of about 100 senior officers, a basic order of battle, and some text exhibits.  It’s somewhat larger in depth and scope now.

A decade later, in March 2006, I started posting here on behind AotW as accompaniment. So the blog celebrates a big anniversary, too, now in its 15th year.

I plan to keep adding to Antietam on the Web and occasionally blogging for at least a couple more years, so I hope both my readers will stick around for that.

In 1864, building on information collected by others, civil engineer Simon G. Elliott documented the locations of more than 5,800 soldiers’ burials on the battlefield of Antietam on a map. His similar work for burials at Gettysburg has long been known, but a copy of his Antietam map lay largely unnoticed in the New York Public library for many years until library staff digitized the map and made it available online between 2015 and 2018.

In June 2020 Gettysburg researchers Tim Smith and Andrew Dalton were looking into Elliott, came upon this map, and brought it to the attention of other historians and the public.

I’ve broken my digital copy into 14 large segments, each covering about 1/2 square mile of the battlefield, to make it a little easier for you to explore and make sense of this huge map. They’re all now up on Antietam on the Web (AotW) in a special exhibit.

49 individual soldiers and 32 regiments are identified on the big map. I have highlighted each of them in white and linked them to related pages on AotW so you can get more information about them.