Thanks for your perspective, and hope to hear more about your work on the 14th Alabama Regiment.

We're in agreement about poor communications accounting for many records marked AWOL. Official communications took place on paper and normally transmitted by mail. For many reasons letters and reports did not arrive at their destination, and even when they did, Confederate clerks already had a stack of older documents to process. If I understand regulations, a soldier who had overstaid leave had to be marked AWOL, even if he as still in a hospital or a prison camp. When the Orderly Sergeant who composed the roll submitted in his records to the War Department, information on that roll was never corrected at a later date.