Civil War Soldiers System Data Is Completed, New Features Coming
By Deborah Fitts
November 2004

WASHINGTON, D.C. - After 11 years of mostly volunteer effort, the National Park Service (NPS) declared Sept. 27 that the computerized database known as the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System (CWSS) was complete.

NPS made the announcement at Ford's Theatre National Historic Site. The event also included word that the Park Service will partner with the National Geographic Society to create multi-layered Civil War battlefield maps that will be available on the Internet.

The completed database has basic information on the service records of 6.3 million Civil War soldiers. It also includes lists of regiments from both armies and their histories, and information about the battles they fought. The final leg of the project was the inclusion of the records of 1 million soldiers from Pennsylvania and Virginia.

NPS's John Peterson, who served as project manager, hailed the volunteer work of the Mormons, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and genealogists to record the information from the National Archives. If the work had been contracted out it would have cost $4.5 million, he said.

Still, Peterson said the entering of soldier, regimental and battle information was only "the first phase" of the project. The most dramatic next step, he said, is the National Geographic joint venture.

He said NPS and National Geographic will "co-brand" the new project on the Web. They will take major battlefields like Gettysburg and Shiloh and enter myriad details on maps, which visitors to the Web site can click on for more information. For instance, clicking on a barn or other landmark will provide battle history and possibly an "interpretive sound bite," Peterson said.

Some results of the collaboration may be on the Web by spring, Peterson said. "We're just at the strategizing period."

He said NPS would count on National Geographic to produce the Internet mapping work. "They have more technology than we do." He called the nonprofit "the prime mapping organization in the world."

The work will be done by NGMaps.com, a for-profit arm of the National Geographic Society. Peterson said NGMaps was well-known, particularly for its maps of national parks in the West, like Yellowstone. Profits from NGMaps are plowed back into the Society.

Meanwhile, NPS will make other additions to the CWSS on its own. NPS personnel are currently working to install "real high-quality images" of all the monuments at the more than 30 NPS Civil War sites, a feature that should be ready in the spring.

And the CWSS will also have available about 30 interpretive stories from the sites that reflect the parks' new initiative to address slavery as a cause of the war. The stories were written by the parks in response to an NPS "Rally on the High Ground" workshop sponsored by Superintendent Robert Sutton of Manassas National Battlefield Park.

NPS also plans to start what Peterson called a "Civil War thematic Web site." It would display a history of the war and focus on aspects such as hospitals and women in the Civil War, and will offer bibliographies, interpretive stories from the parks, and links to the parks.