Looking for a portrait of a specific Civil War soldier or sailor? Or maybe soldiers from a specific state or regiment? The quest can be challenging and time-consuming—and incredibly rewarding when you glimpse the face or faces of those you’ve been seeking.
Today the odds of finding identified images are improving thanks to a growing list of repositories available online for researchers, genealogists, historians, and other photo sleuths.
I am delighted to add a new online resource to the list: Identified Civil War Soldier, Sailor and Civilian Portraits in Military Images Magazine. This database is an inventory of identified persons from the Civil War period who have appeared since we began publication in 1979. As of this writing, the database documents 8,383 identified military portraits from the Union (6,094) and the Confederacy (1,770), plus non-military individuals (519) from the period. The database will be updated as new issues are published.
This project has been more than a year in development. It is a sortable spreadsheet that includes five major categories of information:
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- Individual’s name.
- State, unit and branch of service.
- Issue and page number of Military Images.
- Image format and information about the photographer.
- Relevant notes.
There are no images pictured in this database because the vast majority are owned by private collectors who have given Military Images one-time permission to publish. Though these images are not copyrighted, we respect the collectors’ intellectual property rights. To access portraits, users have several options detailed on the spreadsheet.
I hope you find this resource a valuable research tool.
Ronald S. Coddington
Editor & Publisher
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