Roster Discrepency Question

David Ireland

Corporal
Joined
Nov 29, 2017
So today I went to the local union cemetery to take pictures of the stones to register them with the SUVCW so they don't get forgotten and so future generations can find their ancestors' graves, as well as for my own interests to look up the engagements they were in to see what they went through.

To my frustration, most of them didn't show up on the rosters for their regiment as listed on their tombstones. Is that a common thing? Why?
 
Begs the question, are you looking at the right roster? I know in the research I do at my job (we use the SUVCW database as one of our standard sources in research), we occasionally run across people who were on the roster of regiments that were say 3 month units, and not 3 years units, that share the same unit number/co name. Ocassionally we also find misspellings of names, so names that are close to those you are looking for might be the ones you are looking for. It may be worth checking the errata as well. The Ohio Roster I work with on a day to day basis is infamously innacurate, the records were such a mess they weren’t published till the 1880s, and they started with Volume 2!
 
Begs the question, are you looking at the right roster? I know in the research I do at my job (we use the SUVCW database as one of our standard sources in research), we occasionally run across people who were on the roster of regiments that were say 3 month units, and not 3 years units, that share the same unit number/co name. Ocassionally we also find misspellings of names, so names that are close to those you are looking for might be the ones you are looking for. It may be worth checking the errata as well. The Ohio Roster I work with on a day to day basis is infamously innacurate, the records were such a mess they weren’t published till the 1880s, and they started with Volume 2!

New York's records are pretty good but some dates can be little dicey on occasion. Pennsylvania's are riddled with misspellings and incomplete information. I still use it but with caveats.

Ryan
 
Most Indiana rosters I've come across appear to be accurate, I haven't meddled all too much in other State's. Can you give us a few examples and maybe we can compare research/sources etc etc to see if you're missing some source for data. The NPS Soldiers and Sailors rosters appear to be pretty accurate from my experience.
 
Earlier this year I finished researching the 46 veterans buried in the historic cemetery where I volunteer and I found a number of discrepancies and omissions from rosters. Here's some of the reasons names didn't appear on rosters:

two men joined up under an alias and were on the rosters under those aliases;
several men joined one unit but were transferred to another soon afterward but their stones noted the first unit where they don't appear on the rosters available;
one man's stone had the wrong man's unit but the right name (most of the stones were bought by the G.A.R. long after the war);
several units were merged/re-named at some point and rosters just got jumbled;
several men just don't show on the rosters of the units in which they served and I couldn't find out why - their service is confirmed by pension applications which were validated by the war department.

So, in just my small sample there were a number of cases where published rosters failed to show all the men in the unit. Good luck on your project and good on ya for doing it.
 
Wow. What an interesting set of possibilities.

I'd be curious what your take is on this mystery.

https://civilwartalk.com/threads/general-question.147709/#post-1849093


I can't help you solve the mystery but can say you should order a copy of his pension application file (the NATF 85B form, not the "full" file NATF 85D). It'll cost you $30 and you'll likely have to wait a month to get it but it'll have your answer. There were standard forms the applicant had to fill out and they contain a lot of genealogical information in addition to documenting the applicant's service record (and they were verified by the war department) and medical conditions. Sometimes there are also letters from other people verifying one thing or the other and those can be interesting. You don't get anything more of use with the "full" package - which costs $100 and takes longer - so just order the standard package.

Here's where you can get the form:

https://www.archives.gov/files/forms/pdf/natf-85.pdf

You'll need the application number but the forms were all digitized by Ancestry so if you have a membership you can find that by doing a search of your guy and selecting "military service" from the search menu. Fold3 also has them I think but Ancestry is the easiest.

You can order the package on line but I've had a lot of problems with that option so if it were me I'd just go back to the good old mail-it-in option. That also allows you to attach a copy of the application form (which you can't do if filing electronically) which is a good thing because for some reason the Archives folks don't always seem able to interpret what you copy onto the form and will sometimes respond that they didn't find any pension file; providing the form copy is proof that there is, indeed, a file and once they have that they miraculously find the file.

Hope that helps.
 
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