Using USCT pension records to restore slave families
Wrapping up Black History Month with a guest post on the blog at Ancestry.com: Restoring Slave Families Using USCT Pension Records.
Continue reading →Would the real George Washington please stand up?
According to the National Park Service’s Soldiers and Sailors System, there were twenty enlisted men named George Washington in the 5th U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery. These all would have been black men, the vast majority, former slaves. The 5th U.S. … Continue reading →
Regimental Name Game
Researching early regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) can sometimes be difficult. Unit names may have changed several times throughout their service. The earliest regiments, organized between the fall of 1862 and the creation of the Bureau of Colored … Continue reading →
Tim O’Brien & Milliken’s Bend
A line from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is the very first sentence in my book: “‘The only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity,’ writes Tim O’Brien in his Vietnam War classic, The Things They Carried. He could have been writing … Continue reading →
Book Review: Tainted Breeze
Tainted Breeze: The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas, 1862 by Richard B. McCaslin remains one of the most thorough treatments of this violent effort to bring in and subdue draft dodgers and perceived Unionists in an area of Texas that … Continue reading →