J. Michael,

"Bruce" will do just fine. "Mr. Nichols" was my father's name.

When you ask for "a roster for this militia" I assume from the correspondence some of us held in this forum last October that you are referring to the "Lawrence County Home Guards." You can read our comments to see that there were several types of Union militia in and around Lawrence County during the war, and that some of the men who served in the old 1861 "Lawrence County Home Guards" undoubtedly served also in some of the other types of militia (and regular units) that came along later in the war. Dept. of the Missouri chief General Henry W. Halleck during the winter of 1861/1862 ordered all the home guards disbanded so that the men who manned those "home grown" units would join the newly-forming state and federal units for control purposes.

J. Michael, with that assumption in mind, please follow these directions to obtain your very own copy of the roster of this unit online:

1. Enter the search engine operated from the website of the MO Sec'y of State's Office at http://sos.mo.gov/archives/soldiers and;

2. At the bottom of the page enter under NAME the surname "Brashear,"; select as CONFLICT "Civil War"; leave alone the setting "ALL SERVICE RECORDS" and press ENTER.

3. Select the link for more details offered under the name "Robert Brashear" that appears.

4. When the page for "Robert Brashear" appears, select the link for his unit "Lawrence County Home Guards." (I realize there is supposed to be a faster way to use this search engine, but I just tested it; that doesn't get the result I want; and this does. As much as I appreciate and use this device, it is not very user friendly.)

5. What should appear is the roster for the entire unit called "Lawrence County Home Guards" starting with the first part of the alphabet. Use the links at the bottom of the page to move around in the roster.

As I stated in October, there are 492 entries at the rate of 75 per page. My experience with these former MO Adjutant General's records tells me that not all MO Civil War soldiers records were entered or saved for various reasons, especially the southerners. If you want to drill deeper on the links for individual soldiers, you will encounter the MO Adjutant General cards that give some detail about that soldier in this particular unit. If you want to know in what other units a particular soldier also served, you will need to return to the search engine's first page and enter his surname followed by a comma with the other selections I specified in # 2. Sadly, this search engine will only bring up surnames with the exact spelling you enter, so you may not get the record you want if the soldiers name is misspelled on the record (which is VERY common). Try different spellings of the surname to overcome this limitation, or try surnames of his comrades in that particular unit if you happen to know them. With practice, you can easily master this most useful search engine.

Good hunting!

Bruce Nichols