"I have never heard mention by word of mouth of the Confederate soldiers in my family tree on either family side and had to discover all of them on my own. I wonder now, as a middle aged adult, why."

In most cases in my family tree it is the same, except for one ggg grandfather that "went of to war and never came back". I did the research and found his military history and what happened to him. He is buried in a POW camp up North. But the rest of my ancestors and their partication in the war was lost to our family history. It has been a great journey back in time to discover it.

In my case, my family tree was not that well known until my sister and I started digging. We knew it very well up until the generation just after the Civil War, after that it was fuzzy, not anymore. We knew our mother and grandmothers line very well, back to the 1600s but our father and grandfathers, etc., where, lets say ignored. It was always the women who carried the memories of the families, not the men.

Thank you for the census tip, I've never used that option.

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David Upton