Help us Preserve the Veteran Bounty Land Records—Update!

The National Genealogical Society (NGS) is spearheading a campaign to save thousands of precious military records housed in the National Archives that are rapidly deteriorating and of vital interest to genealogists. Along with the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and the leaders of FamilySearch, NGS is reaching out to local and state genealogy societies across the U.S. in an organized effort to preserve these records, and StLGS has recently begun to assist in these important efforts. We learned about the project a few months ago and posted some preliminary information then. Here is an update, now that StLGS is officially part of the project.

Remembering Our Fallen Ancestors Who Served in the Military

Happy Memorial Day! This day has turned into the unofficial start of summer, but it was never created as a day to show off our barbecue skills or to bring our white jeans and shoes out of storage. The huge casualty toll of the Civil War was responsible for more gravesites than anyone could possibly have imagined, leading to the first "Decoration Day" on 30 May 1868 at Arlington National Cemetery. More than 5,000 people gathered to listen to future U.S. president James Garfield commending people for coming together to "pay their tribute of grateful homage" by walking through the cemetery and decorating the graves of fallen soldiers. During the next few decades, the idea of decorating soldiers' graves became widespread. By 1890, all of the former Union states had an official Decoration Day. Eventually, the name changed to Memorial Day, and by the end of World War II, soldiers from all American wars were being remembered throughout the country. In 1971, the name of the day was changed, and the fourth Monday in May became the fixed day of the holiday. Most of us have military ancestors who served and died in far-off places over hundreds of years. We certainly can't go to all of their graves to place wreaths or leave flowers, but we have an alternative for you, if you would like to remember their service.

Can You Help with a Mystery?

The holidays are upon us, and we were just going to wish all of you a fun week of celebrating and take off to attend our own family festivities, when our resident photo matchmaker, Shirley Waddell, sent us the following plea. What a great Christmas we might make for the family of a deceased soldier if we could find a relative and return the items that were donated some time ago to St. Louis Genealogical Society. Here are the details . . .

Veterans Day and Genealogy

Happy Veterans Day! If you, your children, or other living family members have served in the military, we thank you so much for your service. If your parents, grandparents, or any other relatives in the past have served, this day commemorates them as well, and this holiday Monday, we are reminded of their commitment to our country and everything it stands for. Veterans Day, once called Armistice Day, is often confused with Memorial Day. The latter honors our fallen heroes, whereas Veterans Day was created as a way to say thank you and to honor living veterans. It is a fairly new holiday which began early in the twentieth century, when President Woodrow Wilson called on Americans to “remember the armistice,” signed on 11 November 1918, that ended World War I. His intention was to emphasize peace and to honor thousands of men who served in the war.

NGS Announces Continuation of War of 1812 Project

The War of 1812 began on the heels of the American Revolution and had the new nation scrambling once again for sovereignty over Great Britain. Having won their independence in 1783, the former colonists now found themselves facing British troops hoping to keep them from moving further westward into North America. Enlisting the help of several indigenous tribes also eager to keep the restless settlers from taking more land, Great Britain’s troops began an assault on America from both land and sea.

Missouri in the War of 1812

Were your families in what is now Missouri before 1812? Did you know the War of 1812 included men from Missouri? St. Louis Genealogical Society has published a set of books, The War of 1812 in Missouri, volumes 1 and 2, that may move your research forward for those early families. These volumes are rich in the history of the pioneers and Native Americans who were in the Mississippi and Missouri River Valleys during the early nineteenth century. The editors have added maps, glossaries, bibliographies, and indexes filling both volumes with valuable information for researchers of the time period. The maps alone are a Missouri researcher's gold mine.

Remembering Those Who Fought in the Mexican American War

The year was 1846 and James K. Polk was president. You may remember from high school history that he was a firm believer in the Manifest Destiny, the right of the United States to continue spreading westward from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. Texas, which had belonged to Mexico until it won its independence in 1836, had only recently joined the union, a process that took a decade because it was a southern state with pro-slavery values, and its statehood was opposed by the northern states. Mexico still controlled what is now California and most of the Southwest. However, some of the boundary lines between the United States and Mexico were not fully drawn. The U.S. believed that they owned a slice of land between the Rio Grande and the Nueces River; Mexico claimed the same territory. In the summer of 1845, even before Texas became a state, the president sent U.S. troops into the disputed area, starting a ball rolling that would lead to all-out war.

An Unsung Hero of Family History: Lyman Copeland Draper

Sometimes we are guilty of thinking that people in the past were not at all like us, but the more we study family history, the more we find individuals worried about precious documents, fearful of the loss of oral tradition, and trying to preserve facts surrounding important events in American history. One of those unsung heroes was Lyman Copeland Draper, who lived in the nineteenth century and gathered as much information as he could on those he called “heroes of the Revolution” in the American south. Draper spent most of his life collecting information on the French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War, and the War of 1812 in what he called the “Trans-Allegheny West, which included the western Carolinas and Virginia, some portions of Georgia and Alabama, the entire Ohio River valley, and parts of the Mississippi River valley.”*

Although a single index to the entire collection does not exist, you can learn how to access and use the Draper collection from nationally-known genealogical researcher, Dr. David McDonald, at the St. Louis Genealogical Society's Family History Conference on Saturday, 14 May 2022.

Put Meat on the Bones of Your Family History!

You have undoubtedly heard many genealogists talking about “putting the meat on the bones” when it comes to their family history. Just how do you do that and what does it mean? We learn when we start working on our genealogy that it’s vital to capture names, dates, and places for everyone in our family tree. Of course, it is absolutely necessary to find documentation of basic facts and we need specific information to do that. But if we want to understand our ancestors as living, breathing human beings instead of just statistics, we need to know much more. We want to learn about their personalities, their occupations, their leisure activities, and their interactions in their communities. The more “meat” we put on those bare-bones dates and numbers, the more those people who preceded us become real.

Preserving the Stories of our Veterans

As we celebrate a more subdued Memorial Day this year, without parades and with fewer barbecues and swimming parties, perhaps we have more time to think about why we have this holiday in the first place. Originally called Decoration Day, it was intended as a quiet day of remembrance, one in which to decorate the graves of those who gave service to the country. It's a rare family, indeed, who doesn't have one or more member who served in the military. From drummer boys in the American Revolution to military generals in countries all over the world, our relatives, male and female, helped to preserve our democracy and way of life. If you are lucky, you may have a veteran from World War II, Korea, or Vietnam still alive in your family. Or, you may know a younger veteran from one of the more recent conflicts. Their experiences in the military undoubtedly affected their lives, and, with your help, could be preserved to add to our collective history.

Preserving Personal Military History

The easiest way to preserve the military history of your relatives is to encourage them to tell their stories, either orally or in writing. In this day of videos and computer chats, it is relatively easy to put someone in front of a camera to capture their memories. If you (or they) find that too daunting, they
can dictate to someone or create their own memoirs. Some of us are lucky enough to have relatives who have done just that. Although your blogger seldom injects herself into these posts, this week I will introduce you to Sgt. Sol Kanfer, my dad, who served in the Army Air Corps in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands as an armorer during WWII. Dad never saw combat, but he and his squadron were responsible for the weapons used by troops and on airplanes that flew over the Pacific. Luckily for my family, he loved to write and take photographs, so he returned to civilian life with a rich archive of memories, which, some fifty years later, he published as a series of anecdotes in book form. We always knew that those war experiences had a huge influence on Dad's life, but without his book of stories, we never would have understood exactly how and why. He explained the importance of the medals he kept in a frame, the odd pieces of memorabilia he brought back, and the need for preservation of the giant stack of love letters between my mother and him. His book is a priceless treasure!

If you want to share your family's military stories, one of the largest repositories for personal military history is the Library of Congress Veterans History Project. According to the website, the project "collects, preserves, and makes accessible the personal accounts of American war veterans so that future generations may hear directly from veterans and better understand the realities of war." They are collecting information from all conflicts beginning with World War I through the Iraq War and are interested in personal narratives in any form, correspondence, and visual materials. You may want to begin with a look at their Frequently Asked Questions for details on what and how to submit.

If you have family military memorabilia that will not be passed down, consider donating it to any military museum in your city or region. Most will gladly accept donations. Dad's collection has gone to a small military museum in Daytona Beach, Florida, where he spent the last twenty-five years of his life. They were delighted to have everything we gave them.

Here in St. Louis, the Soldiers Memorial Military Museum at 1315 Chestnut Street (currently closed because of COVID-19) honors those who served from the St. Louis region. You can look at their online collection to get an idea of the wide variety of objects in their possession, and, once the museum reopens, contact them for details on submission of artifacts.

Honoring those who have and will continue to keep us free and safe is so very important. We, as family historians, have the ability to make sure they and what they did for us are not forgotten.

Missouri Soldiers Database: 1812 through WWI

Did you know that the Missouri State Archives has a massive database on their website holding information on Missouri soldiers who fought from the nineteenth into the beginning of the twentieth century? Called The Soldiers Database: War of 1812–World War I, it contains information, according to the website, on more than 576,000 Missourians "who served in the military from territorial times through World War I. . . . The records primarily consist of individual service cards, but the extensive collection also includes muster rolls, special orders, reports, and more."

The service cards were originally created "to collect historical and statistical information about the men and women who served in the military." The information on them was abstracted from original records and maintained by the Missouri Adjutant General's office until they were transferred to the Missouri State Archives. The original cards contain a wide variety of information, including description of wounds, dates of enlistment, service, and discharge, and, of course, personal data.

The Soldiers Database includes entries for twelve wars and military engagements, from the well-known, such as the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I, to the "battles that were peculiarly Missourian, including the Heatherly War of 1836, the Mormon War of 1838, and the Iowa (Honey) War of 1839. The bulk of the service cards, more than 380,000 of them, record the fractured history of Missouri during the bloodiest of all American wars—the Civil War." There are descriptions of all the wars on the site.

The database can be searched by soldier's name or unit. Digital images of original service records are linked for many of the soldiers; however, not all.

Begin your search by placing either a surname or last name, first name into the search box. You will get a list from which to choose that gives you names, wars, and some description. Next, click on a person of interest and you will get a screen like the one below. If there is a button at the bottom next to "Image" so you can view the record, click on the button. A PDF will download to your computer. In this case, notice the interesting information on the soldier's Civil War record on the white card below.

 

Ready to search? Here is the URL:

https://s1.sos.mo.gov/records/archives/archivesdb/soldiers/#soldiersearch