This week’s post comes from guest blogger Constance Potter, who is a reference archivist at the National Archives in Research Services, Archival Operations-Washington, DC. Connie is the lead expert on reference relating to the upcoming 1940 Census release on April 2, 2012. Today we focus on the places where you can find a person in an [...]

The more we interact with the public, whether at national conferences or NARA-sponsored events such at the annual Genealogy Fair, the more we hear how much researchers would like to see our finding aids available online.  Well, this seems like a good opportunity to point out that two of our most popular genealogy Reference Information [...]

Since the beginning of the Family Tree Friday blog, we’ve talked a lot about pension records and indexes, but I’m not too sure we’ve ever mentioned or even defined that other essential and related benefit of military service, the bounty land warrant!  Pensions, of course, have been granted to veterans since the end of the [...]

Most people who research information about relatives or ancestors who were Federal employees probably don’t make enough use of government publications.  So, it might interest you to know that the Federal Government actually produced its own employee directory, the Official Register of the United States, which spans the early 19th to the mid-20th centuries (1817-1959).  [...]

When you consider the vast holdings of federal records at the National Archives, what usually jumps to mind are such mainstay documents as Civil War pensions and service records, immigration passenger manifests, Congressional petitions and memorials, or homestead applications.  Certainly, the Charters of Freedom—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—figure prominently [...]

This week’s post comes to you from guest blogger Jennifer Dryer, who works in the National Declassification Center at the National Archives.  Jennifer is completing a cross-training assignment with the Archives I Research Support Branch, where she has been working on reference relating to the upcoming 1940 Census release.  Some questions on the 1940 census [...]

As a way to tie together all the Confederate prisoner of war records that we’ve discussed over the last several weeks, I thought you might want to know about a specific record the War Department compiled in the early 20th century to document all of the Confederate POWs who died in Federal custody during the [...]

Since I introduced a lot of information about Confederate prisoners of war in my last blog post, it seemed appropriate to mention what material we also have available relating to Union POWs held in Confederate military prisons.  As you may imagine, records about Confederate prison camps are not nearly as complete as those for Union [...]

Continuing the discussion of Confederate records, another major portion of material in Record Group 109, War Department Collection of Confederate Records, includes records about Confederate prisoners of war.  Of particular note, these are actually records created by Union military prisons, compiled or maintained by the Office of the Commissary General of Prisoners in the U.S. War [...]

Confederate records that survived the Civil War cover a variety of aspects and functions of both the Confederate government and its armed forces.  One of the major components of the War Department Collection of Confederate Records includes records of various military hospitals that were established in several Southern states during the war.  Administered by the Confederate [...]