Roll of Honor: Soldiers Interred in National Cemeteries

In a previous post we discussed resources for the researcher still unsure where their Civil War veteran is buried. If you’re still seeking that information this resource may help solve the mystery: The Roll of Honor: Names of Soldiers Who Died in Defense of the American Union, Interred in National Cemeteries. Long title but a very important little used resource. The Roll of Honor is the only official listing of Union soldiers who died in the Civil War. This is a 27 volume set containing more than 300,000 names of soldiers who died in hospitals, as prisoners of war, and on the battlefield. The first two volumes of the series were published in 1865-66 and the additional volumes were published through 1870. This work was updated recently in 1994.

The compilation of this extensive list of burials dates back to the Mexican War. Fought from 1846 to 1848, approximately 1,733 US soldiers died in combat. Most of their bodies were never recovered and are buried in a cemetery in Mexico City. Very few of these men were ever identified. Sadly the war ended with unknown US soldiers buried in an unknown foreign cemetery. To prevent this from ever happening again the War Department issued General Order #75, on September 11, 1861. The order stated that the commanding officers of military departments and corps were responsible for identifying and burial of their dead.

To help with this process President Lincoln signed an act ten months later that enabled the purchase of ground for National Cemeteries. Twelve National Cemeteries were established in 1862. They included Alexandria National Cemetery, VA; Annapolis National Cemetery, MD; Camp Butler National Cemetery, IL; Cypress Hills National Cemetery, NY; Danville National Cemetery, KY; Fort Leavenworth National Cemetery, KS; Fort Scott National Cemetery, KS; Keokuk National Cemetery, IA; Loudon Park National Cemetery, MD; Military Asylum National Cemetery, Washington, D. C.; Mill Springs National Cemetery, KY, and New Albany National Cemetery, IN. This action was to help with the somber job of burying the fallen Union soldiers.

Yet after a battle, in the midst of carnage and chaos, many soldiers who died were buried close to where they fell. Some of those graves were well marked but most were not. Often great numbers were buried in a mass grave or in trenches. One example of this is at Spotsylvania Court House. There were thousands upon thousands of casualties on both sides from this battle. Trenches were dug for one mass burial. Only a few of the bodies were buried in single graves. A year later when those dispatched by the Quartermaster Dept. went back to bury the Union dead only 700 were identified. Thousands became “unknown”.

In 1866, after the war’s end, the Quartermaster’s Dept. gathered their records to publish where fallen Union soldiers were buried and later reinterred. It was found that most of the records were sloppy. Many names were misspelled and the handwriting was eligible. Some bodies that were reinterred were not recorded and of course there were those that were unidentifiable. The volumes came out haphazardly as a book here and another published months later. The attempt to never again have US soldiers unidentified and their final resting place unknown fell short. Yet there is still a lot of information on the burial of thousands of Union soldiers. Twenty-seven volumes to be exact. The 1994 edition of Roll of Honor is an updated, comprehensive list of the final resting place of Civil War Union soldiers who died on the battlefield, as prisoners or in hospitals. It is as complete as possible.

As you search this resource you will find the original place of interment for your soldier, his name, rank, company, regiment, date of death, second interment with cemetery section and grave number.

The Roll of Honor was originally compiled without an index making its vast amount of information almost unsearchable. It would take a tremendous amount of time to search the 27 volumes for a single name. Martha and William Reamy took on the project of indexing this work by soldier’s name, including volume and page. They published their Index to the Roll of Honor in 1995. A second index was created by Mark Hughes. His 1996 index, The Unpublished Roll of Honor, approaches the volumes by indexing cemeteries, listing them state by state, then alphabetically. This gives the researcher the option to approach their search by both soldier name and by cemetery (if known). Both indexes are separate from the original work and stand alone on their own merit but allow a researcher to navigate the work much easier than before.

I searched WorldCat.org and found the various volumes are available online and the 1994 edition available at most university libraries in my area. The 1860s edition is also online at Archive. If possible try to research the newer work.

If you’re still searching where your Union Civil War ancestor is buried and he died during the war, your answers may be in these volumes. The Roll of Honor: Names of Soldiers Who Died in Defense of the American Union, Interred in National Cemeteries, is a little known resource but dedicated to remembering those soldiers who gave the ultimate sacrifice. Good luck in your research.