Unlike today's army, Confederate soldiers did not have individual service files. A man's service was documented on the muster rolls of the regiment (or battalion, battery, company, troop) in which he was enrolled. Each Confederate unit was required to submit a muster roll when that unit was first mustered into Confederate service, when they reorganized, and when they disbanded. Additionally, each unit was required to submit a bimonthly muster roll for as long the unit was in service.

The muster roll was supposed to record each man's name, rank, date and place of enlistment, age, nativity, physical description (color of eyes, hair and complexion, as well as height), status (present or absent as of the date of the muster roll), and remarks. The remarks section was supposed to record what the soldier had been up to during the preceding two-month period. Examples of remarks include -- promotions, status of pay, receipt of reenlistment bounty, discharge, wounds, furlough, court-martials, killed or missing in action, prisoner of war, etc.

The muster roll information constitutes the basis of the "Compiled Service Records" system maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration. The NARA microfilms consists of thousands of "abstract cards" on which clerks abstracted information on each individual soldier from every unit muster roll. The cards were stored in individual envelopes marked with each soldier's name, to which were added whatever original documents could be found -- discharge certificates, hospital admissions, prisoner of war records, etc.

Now here's the problem -- many soldiers who honorably served in the Confederate army have no records on file at NARA. This is due to an incredibly large number of circumstances, but probably the main reason is that the muster rolls of the unit in which they served were lost or destroyed, or for whatever reason were never received by the Confederate War Department at Richmond. Some units -- those operating closest to Richmond -- continued to submit muster rolls up to and including April 30, 1865. However, the further away a regiment was from the flagpole, the scarcer are the surviving records. Few muster rolls from regiments in the Trans-Mississippi Army (Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Texas and the Indian Territory) are available after February 29, 1864 (covering the January/February 1864 bimonthly report). In many cases, there are no records after June 30, 1863 -- especially for those regiments which were captured at Vicksburg and Port Hudson in July 1863 and later reorganized in the Trans-Mississippi Department. The reasons for this lack of muster rolls includes the difficulty in communication with Richmond, especially after the Yankees took control of the Mississippi River, the fact that some regiments burned their records before surrendering, the pervasive paper shortage in the South, etc.

This lack of official records for so many soldiers made it difficult to document a veteran's service when he or his widow applied for a Confederate pension 30 or more years after the war. Typically, upon receipt of an application for a pension, the State pension board would send an inquiry to the Adjutant-General's Office, U.S. War Department (who then had custody of the Compiled Service Records), asking for verification of the applicant's service. Clerks in the A.G.'s office would then search for the CSR envelope containing the man's abstract cards, and send a letter back to the State pension board verifying the man's service. In those cases where, for reasons cited above, there was no record of the man's service, the applicant could submit sworn statements from his former commanding officer and/or from comrades with verified service, attesting to his service.

For modern researchers, the problem with relying solely on pension records to put together a roster of a Confederate unit is that, just like today, there were some cases of fraud in the Confederate pension system. For that reason, I generally do not include a name on the roster of a regiment I've researched, if the only documentation is a pension application. I do include names if I can find a document from the period that contains his name and corroborates his claim of service -- prisoner of war information, surrender or parole records, the very useful "List of Families of Indigent Soldiers" from several Arkansas counties in 1863, a reference to the man in a letter written by a member of the regiment during the war, United Confederate Veterans membership lists, etc.

One thing I *never* rely on is "family oral tradition". Just about every Southern family, including my own, has some oral traditions about their Confederate ancestors. These stories, including my own, rarely are a hundred-percent accurate, and often are a combination of wishful thinking and outright fiction. Even those that have some kernal of truth are often embellished out of all proportion. I sometimes add information to rosters I'm researching if the story is verifiable, but I don't include oral traditions about Confederate spies, or single-handedly winning the battle of Gettysburg.

When Edward Gerdes and I research and post the records of Arkansas regiments, we try to make them as accurate as possible. To the CSR information we transcribe from NARA microfilms, we add as much *verifiable* information as we can find from a wide variety other sources. Hopefully, we have put together a resource that historical and genealogical researchers can rely on with confidence, but at any rate one that honors and memorializes our Heroes in Gray.

Regrettably, I've had to quit providing source citations for the research I've done, after I found my research being presented in its entirety in some publications and commercial websites, the authors using the source citations I naively provided them at their request, to give the impression that they had done the research themselves. The thing that bothers me about that is that they are charging historical and genealogical researchers for information that I always intended to be freely available. We don't even accept advertisements on our webpage, much less charge a fee for downloading it, or for look-ups in our database.

(Sorry about that little diatribe!)