Logistical software

[T Bone]

Hey fellers, does anyone know of some software, or anyway to plot logistical troop movements?
I would love to catalog somehow my ancestors' total trek around the south for the duration of the war.
If you have any ideas I would appreciate.

Thanks.

 

[Mark F. Jenkins]

Hm. No ideas here beyond making up a spreadsheet in Excel... but if others have some ideas, I'd be interested to hear them too... could be useful for tracking ship movements!

 

[DaveBrt]

You can do a fair job using current map programs. I use Street Atlas USA. Though the program uses highways from place to place, those highways are frequently where the old roads and railroads were. You can also use the "Via" function to force the program to go the route you desire, rather than the one it creates. Not exact, but useful.

 

[civilwarincolor]

Try Google Earth. You can add pins to places of interest and build routes between them. I have used this on trips to battlefields to plot various rout options, etc. Of course it will show you modern routes & times, but it does a really nice job of plotting things. You can then add dates, etc. to your file and even export it and email it to other family, etc.

 

[AndyHall]

I also would use Google Earth. You can plot and save your own routes, locations, etc.You can even overlay a battlefield map, scanned from a book or downloaded from online, directly on the actual terrain. (That last one requires some practice, though.)

Your real challenge is reconstructing the data to put on the map. The soldiers themselves often had only a vague idea where they were, but you might start with a good regimental history and work from there.

 

[T Bone]

I also would use Google Earth. You can plot and save your own routes, locations, etc.

Your real challenge is reconstructing the data to put on the map. The soldiers themselves often had only a vague idea where they were, but you might start with a good regimental history and work from there.

Thanks for your suggestions. The challenge was real until I found the book, " A History of the Sixtieth Alabama Regiment"
written by Lewellyn A. Shaver, a Captain in the regiment who chronicled in detail their movements.

 

[civilwarincolor]

Another great thing about Google Earth is the price.

 

[Mark F. Jenkins]

I used Google Earth to chart the tracks of the CSS Alabama and the USS Sacramento in early 1864 to see how close they came to each other in the South Atlantic (Alabama was crossing from Cape Town to off the Brazilian coast while Sacramento was crossing from Rio to Cape Town. As Alabama went via St. Helena and Sacramento did not, they missed each other by hundreds of miles. But theoretically, if Sacramento had gone via St. Helena...)

(Since then, though, I've found that that would have been highly unlikely. The prevailing winds and currents-- and consequently, the sailing directions-- would have been dead foul for the Sacramento crossing from Rio to St. Helena, and in an era when oceanic travel was still done under sail, that was a no-go.)