Colorado Territory Civil War Volunteer Records 1861-1865
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The information contained herein has been taken from the original publication, Colorado Territory Civil War Volunteer Records, published by Columbine Genealogical & Historical Society in 1994. The records of the individuals’ issues have been condensed from 8,900 records to 3,616 by combining the records if issues for each individual was in a particular company. As a result, there are still multiple issues for many of the volunteers. In searching for records, there are some things that should be kept in mind:
1. Volunteers were often transferred from one company to another, usually within the same regiment although there are exceptions.
2. There were re-organizations of companies and regiments at least once in the course of the Civil War. As a result, this caused changes of companies/regiments for individual volunteers. Example: Infantry companies became Cavalry companies.
3. The company listed may have been shown as “Cavalry” although for this same time period the company may have first been “Infantry.” Also, many entries had neither Infantry nor Cavalry listed. In most cases these were Infantry companies.
4. Some records are incomplete but that information may be in one of the other records for that same individual. Example: If the individual had issues from 3 different companies, only one of the records may show the enlistment date or place.
5. All of the 12 ledgers did not list issues in the same format. Example 1: Ledger 12 (Company H, 1st Regiment) listed the issues by location as well as by date. Therefore one can easily track the movement of the volunteers to the various forts, camps and battles. Example 2: Ledger 2 (Company C, 1st Regiment) listed the issues of weapons by serial number, carbines and pistols, whereas the other ledgers did not seem to have that information.
6. It appears that the 12 ledgers may have been all that existed for the Colorado Volunteers. However, there are obvious omissions, possibly just pages that were removed from the ledger books while some ledgers have not survived. Also, there are cases where the Colorado Volunteers received issues from Regular US Army stock, thus are not contained in the 12 ledgers. There also a few entries in the 12 ledgers of non-Colorado Volunteers receiving issues from the Colorado Volunteer stock.
7. The references, volume & page(s), refers to the volume and page of the ledgers. These ledgers are housed at Colorado State Archives, Denver, Colorado.
8. Not all of the maps, illustrations and tables from the 1994 publication have been transferred into this on-line presentation. For example, copies of pages from the differing ledgers are not included.