Be Sure to Visit my new 1900 Galveston Storm Website at: http://freepages.genealogy.rootseb.com/~barnette 

CIVIL WAR PRISON RECORDS AVAILABLE

 Researchers interested in locating information on Civil War prisoners of war have an abundance of material to search. The first and most obvious place to begin a search on any Civil War veteran is his compiled military service record or a possible pension file.

 Indexes for both Union and Confederate soldiers are available on microfilm at The Family History Library, Clayton Library and other libraries. Within a year to two the Civil War Soldiers Records Project will be completed and the database will be available at all Civil War battlefields and probably on the Internet and CD-ROM.

 Pensions were granted to needy Union veterans and their widows by the Federal Government. Photocopies of their files are available from the National Archives. Pension benefits for needy Confederates and their widows were offered by most of the former Confederate states during or after the 1890's. A veteran or his widow would have applied in the state in which they lived.

 While records of prisoners exist in many different federal government records group, Record Group 249 has many records of Union prisoners held in Confederate prisons and Record Group 109 has many records for Confederates held in union prisons. These two records groups are held by  the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, DC. Many of the records or indexes to them are microfilmed.

 Records held by NARA often contain registers with information on the capture, confinement and release of a prisoner. Often there are morning reports, hospital records, death, cemetery or burial registers.

 Confederate prisoners confined at the end of the war were released in stages and after they signed an oath of allegiance. By October 1865, of the 96,000 prisoners of war captured or confined by the Union, only 6 remained.

  NATIONAL ARCHIVES ARSONIST ARRESTED

 A part time NARA employee has been arrested and charged with the second of two arson related fires at Archives II, the National Archives and Records Administration facility in Suitland, Maryland. The employee is charged, according to a NARA spokesperson,  with setting the fire at Archives II on April 5 when as many as ten boxes of records were destroyed.

 An earlier arson related fire, on February 29, destroyed 40,000 page of records. The records maintained in the area where the fire occurred were inactive files of deceased war veterans from the Department of Veterans Affairs, records from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Labor Department's Hour and Wage division, the US Patent and Trademark Office; and the District of Columbia government office.

GENEALOGICAL SEMINAR

 Jim Hansen, genealogical reference librarian at the Library of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, will be the featured speaker at the Houston Genealogical Forum's Spring Seminar. The seminar will be held from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Saturday, April 29 at the Scottish Rite Temple, 2900 North Braeswood.

 Hansen's topics will include Getting The Most From All Types Of Indexes; Special Sources And Techniques For Tracing Your Pioneer Ancestors; Getting The Most From Newspaper Research; and Research In the States Of The Old Northwest-Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.

 For more information and a downloadable registration form go to the Forum's website at http://www.rootsweb.com/~txharri2, or, call the Forum's Informational Genealine at 713-827-4440, or, email plpm@ix.netcom.com.

NEWS FROM THE BOOK SHELF

 George Levy's TO DIE IN CHICAGO: Confederate Prisoners at Camp Douglas 1862-65 is an exhaustive and detailed treatise on the North's largest prisoner of war camp in the War between the States. It is available for $ 32.70, postpaid, from Pelican Publishing Company, 1000 Burmaster Street, Gretna, LA 70053.

 Much has been written about the treatment of Union prisoners at Andersonville, Georgia and very little about Union prisons housing Confederates. In post war trials it was proven the South suffered terribly during the war. There was little in the way of food and supplies for Southern troops and this shortage carried over to the prison system.

 In contrast, food and supplies were available in the North. The prison system and the officers in charge of prisons chose to neglect the health, welfare and well being of the prisoners in Camp Douglas and other prisons.

 The book covers the history of the Camp Douglas chronologically through the use phases and administrations of each of her numerous commanders. It began as a Union recruiting depot and training camp on the edge of Chicago and on the marshes of the lake.

 When the Union recruits left Chicago for the front, Camp Douglas took on the duty of being a prisoner of war camp. It housed Confederates captured in Tennessee and other battlefields. By 1863 it was emptied again due to the Dix-Hill Cartel Agreement which allowed Union and Confederate prisoner exchanges. As a result of the prisoner exchanges, Camp Douglas became a repatriation center of Union prisoners of war returning from prisons in the South.

  In it's last phase Camp Douglas, again, became a prisoner of war camp for Confederates newly captured in the field. There were no prisoner exchanges until the end of the war and over 4,000 Confederate prisoners of war had died.c