What was the name of the ancestor? The first thing you need is to get his service record and then get the Event Records for the Company he was in. You cannot use the ‘general history’ of a Regiment to determine where your soldier traveled or what battles he might have been in. You must remember that Companies rarely traveled together and a lot of the time Companies were split up. He might have been on a ‘special assignment’ building a blockhouse or guarding a train or even used as a recruiter while the main forces were somewhere else (or sick or wounded or under arrest).

As an example, the 11th MSM Cav had a little over 300 at the Battle of Kirksville and 200 of them were in reserve. Of the 2nd MSM Cav, only about 125 were at the Battle.

The only positive way you can determine if a particular soldier participated in a specific battle was if he was mentioned in a report or injured or killed. Soldiers sometimes embellished their record a bit in biographies after the war (after all, who was going to check?).

Craig