Black Sailors' Names Going On Civil War Soldier Data Base
By Deborah Fitts
WASHINGTON, D.C.

The 20,000 African American sailors who served in the Union navy have been identified for the first time and are being added to the steadily growing computerized database known as the Civil War Soldiers System (CWSS).

Research on the war's African-American sailors, funded by a $400,000 grant from the Department of Defense, was prompted by the National Park Service's ongoing effort to compile the CWSS, which will include the names of all 5.4 million who served on both sides.

At presstime in October, more than 1 million names from 30 states had been mounted on the Web site (www.itd.nps.gov/cwss), and the remainder could be added as early as the end of next year.

The most dramatic new development was the discovery of the 20,000 black sailors. Their names were compiled by a team of graduate students at Howard University in Washington working under history department professor Joseph Reidy.

The names will go up on the Web Nov. 17, in time to coincide with a celebration ceremony at the Navy Memorial keynoted by Vice Admiral Edward Moore Jr., Commander of the Naval Surface Force of the Pacific Fleet. Moore is the highest-ranking African American in the Navy. National Park Service Director Robert Stanton will also speak.

CWSS project manager Jon Peterson said that, ironically, ascertaining the names of black sailors was made much more difficult than soldier names because the navy was more integrated than the army and black sailors served alongside whites. In fact, service records did not uniformly mention race at all.

Consequently, Peterson said, Howard's researchers pored over muster rolls and rendezvous reports (weekly enlistment returns) for descriptions of hair and eye color, complexion, previous occupation ("slave" was sometimes noted), and other clues.

The 20,000 men sifted from the records were all Union sailors. Out of 600 Union naval vessels, more than 500 had black sailors, Peterson said. He also noted that nearly 20 percent of all sailors in the Union navy came from Maryland or Virginia.

The Civil War Soldiers System was launched in 1993, the brainchild of Shiloh battlefield superintendent Woody Harrell. Peterson tackled the daunting task of transcribing the records by enlisting the help of volunteers from the Mormon Church, the Federation of Genealogical Societies and the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Although all 5.4 million names were entered by late last year, each must pass through a two-stage editing process before going to the Web.

Peterson cautioned that only bare-bones information is available on each individual ã name, unit, and rank entering and leaving service. But links to the history of each regiment (all 5000 regiments are expected to be posted by the end of this year), as well as battles, battle maps, photographs of monuments, prisoner lists, the 14 NPS-owned national cemeteries, Medal of Honor recipients and the like will provide descendants and researchers with a wealth of information.

The database is accessed by two high-capacity Hewlett-Packard Internet servers located in the main Interior building in Washington. The long-term goal, said Peterson, is to link soldiers to regiments and regiments to battlefields, and thereby inspire a new appreciation for battlefields and their historic resources.

"The goal is to help people connect with the actual place where their family played a role," he said.

NPS used as its source for the database the index card for each soldier. The index card was intended as a locator for all of a soldier's cards, which might total 40 to 50, Peterson said ã in all, the National Archives has 140 million hand-written soldier cards.

Clearly, the Archives has a wealth of information on each soldier, Peterson acknowledged, but the task of extracting the information is daunting.

Two different avenues, both "vast," include copying all the data, which would be tremendously labor-intensive, or imaging the cards themselves for inclusion in the database ã a "very expensive" proposition. Peterson said no decision has been made whether to pursue either approach. But he is delighted that the CWSS has reached the 1 million- name milestone, especially after delays that prompted some to wonder whether the system would ever materialize.

"It's taken longer than expected," Peterson said. "I know there are some people in the Park Service who say •Jon's been talking about this for years. It's taken longer than expected.'" But in the intervening years "The Web's gotten so much better," Peterson said.

"The Soldiers System is coming at a time when we can really maximize the Web. "The greatest thing about it is that we're going to reach millions of people. More than 50 million Americans ã maybe 100 million ã are related to Civil War soldiers. We're going to be touching people who may never have thought about the Civil War. It's going to reach a much wider audience and build up a constituency for preserving these places."