Nearly all of us have ancestors who served in the military. My earliest fought in King Philip’s War in 1675 and 1676. King Philip (his Native American name was Metacom, or Metacomet) was one of the sons of Massasoit, the Chief/Sachem who met the Mayflower in 1620 when the ship landed at what’s now called Plymouth.
My direct ancestor, John Moses, and two of his sons fought in the war — both sons were killed.
I’ve had ancestors in almost every conflict since. The highest-ranking man I’ve found was Colonel Thomas Lee in the Revolutionary War. Many of my ancestors suffered maladies during the fighting, just as your ancestors did. Our family was fortunate in some respects. Outside of the two who died in King Philip’s War, only one other died while serving. Seth T. Moses had re-enlisted in the Civil War and, at the time of his death, had been assigned to a hospital unit. He contracted a disease there, and died from it.
Many of my ancestors were wounded. One, named Jerome Alford Morgan, was wounded on three separate occasions during the Civil War. The first time, he was hit with buckshot at the same time he was being bayonetted across both knees. The second was a ball in his arm, near the wrist, which worked its way out at his elbow many years later (surgical techniques were terrible during the Civil War, so he wasn’t operated on).
His third and final wound was another ball, which passed between the esophagus and the juggler vein and came out through his shoulder blade, virtually paralyzing his arm. This wound caused his discharge because he could no longer shoot. Jerome lived until 1925.
How do I know so much about my ancestors? The National Archives in Washington, DC, has millions of records of people who served our country. The Civil War records are particularly interesting, but most of them aren’t online yet. I can understand this, partly because there were about 2.75 million people in the military (on both sides) during that time.
I have records of several of my ancestors, and my largest pension file is 294 pages, just for him. A friend of mine has a file of 500 pages for one of his ancestors. If you multiply the number of pages by almost three million people, that’s a lot of scanning! And then there are the military service records, too.
Some information on Civil War soldiers and sailors is available on sites like ancestry.com and fold3.com, but the sites have concentrated on getting records online for those who died, and those who survived will be done later.
For other conflicts, you might have better luck. The Revolutionary War is well-represented online, and there’s a set of microfilms at the Archives of Michigan in Lansing, called “Selected Records.” I checked for my ancestors, and found a few hits.
One of my ancestors had eight pages on the microfilm. The only problem is the title. I don’t know who selected these records, and what criteria they used — but when I went online to modern sites, I found almost 30 pages for the same man. The eight I had found earlier were included in the set. All of the pages were genealogically important to me, so I’m glad to have the whole set.
The war that’s suffered the most in terms of record keeping is World War I. Most of those records were lost in a fire in St. Louis, Missouri, where they were stored. On July 12, 1973, between 16 million to 18 million military files were destroyed.
Fortunately, some other records can be used to help us learn about those servicepeople. Many discharged veterans filed a copy of their paperwork at the local courthouse (my grandfather’s was located in Hastings). There was also a “census” of World War I veterans, and there’s a copy of these records at the Archives. Unfortunately for me, my grandfather wasn’t discharged until 1921, so he missed the census.
We do, however, have a notebook, and some of the veterans recorded their stories.
— Jim Moses welcomes questions and comments at jmosesgen@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Ionia Sentinel-Standard: Jim Moses: How to discover whether your ancestors served in the military, and when
Reporting by Jim Moses, Community Columnist / Ionia Sentinel-Standard
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