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Just found out that my great, great grandfather was a private with B Company, 27 Iowa Volunteers. Just thought I would share.

Zwinmar wrote: ↑2019-08-03 01:01pm Just found out that my great, great grandfather was a private with B Company, 27 Iowa Volunteers. Just thought I would share.

Good on him for choosing to fight for the Union, and against the traitorous slavocracy.

I don't hold with judging people by their ancestors' deeds, for good or for ill, but I bet you there are a lot of Southerners who secretly envy you, even as they desperately insist that their ancestors did nothing wrong.

I'm a mutt, as I have ancestors from Tennessee and ancestors from Michigan, so I have ancestors who served on both sides of the Civil War.

Insert Disney attraction song here:

All my relatives were from Western Virginia (Now WV). I literally had cousin vs cousin in the Civil War.
Some of them didn't talk for decades afterwards.

I had an ancestor who was the lord of a castle/fort in Wales if that is worth anything.

Also related to the Captain John White of Roanoke.

Isolder74 wrote: ↑2019-08-05 06:43pm I had an ancestor who was the lord of a castle/fort in Wales if that is worth anything.

Also related to the Captain John White of Roanoke.

Most interesting story of distant ancestors I've got is that I'm (supposedly) related by marriage on my Mum's side to Captain James Cook (someone from my Mum's family married his brother, I think).

One Great-Grandad fought for the South. They lost.

Three of my maternal ancestors fought for the Confederacy, were captured early, and cooled their heels in a POW camp while prisoner exchanges were suspended for the remainder of the war.

Rogue 9 wrote: ↑2019-08-14 11:58pm Three of my maternal ancestors fought for the Confederacy, were captured early, and cooled their heels in a POW camp while prisoner exchanges were suspended for the remainder of the war.

Eh, they got off luckier than at least a good 700,000 people did.

Raw Shark wrote: ↑2019-08-09 02:32pm One Great-Grandad fought for the South. They lost.

Same here. My paternal great-great-grandfather was drafted in spite of being a 43-year-old man with nine kids. Luckily he had the good sense to desert and luckier still, he wasn't caught.

Elfdart wrote: ↑2019-08-19 12:09am

Raw Shark wrote: ↑2019-08-09 02:32pm One Great-Grandad fought for the South. They lost.

Same here. My paternal great-great-grandfather was drafted in spite of being a 43-year-old man with nine kids. Luckily he had the good sense to desert and luckier still, he wasn't caught.

Well, Mark Twain was a deserter from the Confederate army, so he's in good company.

By that point in the war, going AWOL was punished by being shot. Then again, serving under Gen. John Bell Hood had the same hazards. He managed to desert just as Hood's army was starting to fizzle out of Georgia and into Alabama. How he managed to make it home to DeKalb County without being shot as a deserter or shanghaied back into the army for another suicidal offensive planned by Hood AND qualify for public assistance as a veteran late in life is a mystery, but one clue is that he named one of his sons after another local who served in the war, on the grounds that he had saved the old man's life. Funny thing is, this other soldier served in the UNION Army.

What proportion of the male population at the time were involved in the war? i.e. what proportion of the US population now adays won't have an ancestor in the civil war? Obviously immigration since the war will have an effect and it probably depends where in the country you live as well I assume that the south ended up calling up most of it's population where as the north although having a larger overall army didn't mobilise a greater proportion of it's population.

A lot of mine fought against the British when they invaded Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They lost, and many were enslaved. After Federation, some of their descendants fought for Australia in both world wars.

Anecdotally, the problem I have noticed is that people always refer to some ancestor they supposedly have and they have no proof. You can see this with so many claiming to have an Indian Princess as a great grandmother, ancestors who fought in the Civil War or the Revolution, etc.
I have an actual name now Calvin Riggs Dodd, this is him which I didn't have before. Sure, I had family legends, story's, and fabrications but no hard evidence.

Of course looking through all this I find some very interesting things: such as on my Paternal side both of his parents lines stretch back to very early 1700's with the Paternal line settling in 1629 in an area that what would later become part of Boston, Massachusetts.
On a side note; I have seen the gravestones for ancestors and family in upstate New York dating from the mid 1700's.

I don't know much of anything about my ancestry-- my grandmother was into that kind of thing, but most of her papers got thrown out after she passed. The most I know is that my paternal side of the family originated in England sometime in the 1600s and migrated here in the 1700s, further details largely unknown.

That said I'm reasonably certain that if the maternal side of my family came before the War, they probably fought for the South. But again, I don't know anything for certain. It doesn't help that that side of the family doesn't really talk much to each other... but findagrave.com suggests that that side of the family emigrated from Ireland in the 1600s (ironic considering my grandfather is a Republican), to Pennsylvania, then from there to North Carolina in the early 1800s. Looks like they were Quakers, of all things.

My family has a a chateau in France and another in Canada that bears our name. No claim to it, obviously, but they're still there.

An unsubstantiated legend: some of my ancestors fought in the Civil War, as Confederates, and were given one cannon and one ball to defend a river from Union crossing. And they managed.

A more likely one is that my great grandmother's grandfather was a German immigrant and blacksmith that became the richest man in Baltimore, but she ran off to marry a poor boy with my surname and sacrificed the inheritance.

Curiously, apparently none of my direct forebears were involved in the Finnish Civil War (I should really check the family's written history, though). Which has had the blessing of not having any emotional stake in that part of Finnish history.

(title didn't really specify WHICH civil war )

Tiriol wrote: ↑2019-09-02 01:48am Curiously, apparently none of my direct forebears were involved in the Finnish Civil War (I should really check the family's written history, though). Which has had the blessing of not having any emotional stake in that part of Finnish history.

(title didn't really specify WHICH civil war )

Well, yeah. Pretty open-ended topic.