The site is a welcome start. I printed out the 9th Alabama Regiment (by company) and found some interesting things. I was prepared for all of the duplicate names- mostly near spellings and variations of the same name. The roster listed 2,583 names for the 9th (about 40% too many)- my own records show 1,506. However, I was surprised how many names were NOT on the list...names that showed up on every list I have ever seen for the 9th, and prominent names like Edward DeWitt Patterson (whose journal has been published).

The names come from the General Index Cards at the National Archives, and having used them via microforms, I know what the duplicate problems are. My own ancestor, William Cowan McClellan is listed in them as William C. McClelland, William McClellan, and W J. McClellan- all from different cards for payroll, wounds, and assignments. The different variations of the names are the product of the Civil War soldiers who probably just wrote down what they heard. I plan to go through the list of the 9th and compare it with my own to see what I can weed out. I am not sure if the NPS has set up a system for corrections or how committed they are to having an updated, comprehensive listing at this point.

I wanted to be critical of the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System at first, but I realized that the majority of it is a fairly reliable roster based on data from the war and not on information gleaned by veterans and historians after the war was long over.

This is also related to the on-going discussion about Alabama casualties during the war. It is still critical to determine just who fought in the war, even briefly, in determining casualty totals by regiment. I think we need to do the tedious work of looking at the thing regiment-by-regiment since the grand totals, while possibly reliable, do not tell the story of what happened to the regiments throughout the war.

John