New Military Burials Feature Lincoln, Custer, a Well-Disguised Jilted Lover and More Than 100 Years of History and Remembrance
10 November 2012 - 4:00AM
Marketwired
Going beyond name, rank and regiment, a new collection of military
burial registers on Ancestry.com provides insight into some of
America's greatest historical figures -- including Abraham Lincoln,
General Custer and others dating to the Civil War. The online,
searchable collection launches today courtesy of a partnership
between Ancestry.com, the world's largest online family history
resource, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
"These began as around 60 amazing, handwritten burial registers
-- more than 9,000 pages of American heroes, where they are buried
and other details," says Dan Jones, Vice President of Content for
Ancestry.com. "And today they can be searched by individual names
and viewed online on Ancestry.com, allowing family historians
everywhere greater insight into the military experience of
ancestors as well as notable personalities."
Highlights of the collection include:
- President Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln's
honorific entry in an Arlington National Cemetery register is
framed with a hand-drawn black border. Under cause of death it
reads "Assassinated; pistol shot by John Wilkes Booth the ball
entering 2 inches below and behind the left ear and lodged in the
brain."
- General George Armstrong Custer. Custer
is among those officers "taken up on Custer's battleground" and
brought to Fort Abraham Lincoln by steamer in 1877. Custer's
brother Thomas and brother-in-law James Calhoun, who were killed at
the Little Big Horn, are in the collection as well.
- Captain Charles William "Charley" Paddock,
USMC. Paddock, winner of the gold medal in the 100 meter at
the 1920 Summer Olympics, and whose 1924 Olympic appearance was
portrayed in the movie Chariots of Fire, died in a World War II
plane crash near Sitka, Alaska, where he is buried.
- Vivia Thomas. According to legend, Thomas
was a jilted fiancé who left home to exact revenge on an army
officer who broke off their engagement. Thomas traveled west
dressed as a man and joined the army at Fort Gibson, her
ex-fiancé's post. She eventually shot and killed him, before dying
herself. When the soldiers of Fort Gibson, who knew her as Private
Thomas, learned of the story, they honored her courage by interment
in the cemetery Officers' Circle.
From the 1860s until the mid-20th century, in some places, U.S.
Army personnel tracked burials at national cemeteries and military
posts in registers that included name, rank, company/regiment, date
and cause of death, age, grave number, and original place of burial
in the case of re-interments. The U.S. Army was responsible for all
national cemeteries from the 1860s until the early 1930s, and they
were responsible for depositing most burial registers at NARA. In
1973, the Army transferred 82 national cemeteries to what is now
VA, where the National Cemetery Administration (NCA) oversees
them.
Concerned for the fragility of these documents and wanting to
expand public access to the contents, NCA scanned about 60
handwritten ledgers to produce more than 9,344 pages of
high-quality digital images. Then in 2011, NCA initiated a
partnership with Ancestry.com to index the ledgers so users can
search them easily. At no cost to the government or taxpayers,
Ancestry.com spent close to 3,000 hours indexing NCA's ledgers
records to make them searchable by name.
The ledgers are one of two new Ancestry.com collections, U.S.
Burial Registers, Military Posts and National Cemeteries, 1862-1960
and U.S. Headstone Applications, 1925-1963, both launching for
Veterans Day 2012. More than 500,000 individuals are included in
these records.
"We are excited to be able to share this wealth of primary
documentation," said VA's Under Secretary for Memorial Affairs
Steve L. Muro. "With the help of Ancestry.com, we have opened the
doors to thousands of service members' histories through the
information contained in these burial ledgers."
The Ancestry.com partnership supports NCA's commemoration of the
Civil War 150th anniversary (2011-2015). More than 72 of NCA's 131
national cemeteries originated with the Civil War. More than 3.7
million Americans, including Veterans of every war and conflict --
from the Revolutionary War to the Global War on Terror -- are
buried in VA national cemeteries in 39 states.
About Ancestry.com Ancestry.com Inc.
(NASDAQ: ACOM) is the world's largest online family history
resource, with approximately 2 million paying subscribers. More
than 11 billion records have been added to the site in the past 15
years. Ancestry users have created more than 40 million family
trees containing approximately 4 billion profiles. In addition to
its flagship site, Ancestry.com offers several localized Web sites
designed to empower people to discover, preserve and share their
family history.
For media inquiries: Heather Erickson Ancestry.com
801-705-7104 herickson@ancestry.com
Ancestry.Com Inc. (MM) (NASDAQ:ACOM)
Historical Stock Chart
From Sep 2024 to Oct 2024
Ancestry.Com Inc. (MM) (NASDAQ:ACOM)
Historical Stock Chart
From Oct 2023 to Oct 2024