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…

Bad news and good news. The bad news is that the famed website cwartillery.org is no more. The good news is that the core information – if not the lively, efficient design – is still available online.

header, The Civil War Artillery Page, 1999 (C. Ten Brink)

Unfortunately, original author Chuck Ten Brink can no longer maintain the site, but he has passed the material to the care of the Robinson Artillery. It begins on their Civil War Artillery page.

Chuck first put his work on the subject on the Web in 1996, and has been thereafter the go-to guy for many of us on terminology, equipment details, guns and artillerists, and (in partnership with Wayne Stark) the Civil War Artillery Encyclopedia and the National Register of Surviving Civil War Artillery (sample: Antietam’s page c. 1998).

I’ll very much miss the old site, but say Hurrah, Chuck, for your long online service!