Featured Soldiers

"...or are you a stranger without even a name,
forever enshrined behind some glass pane,
In an old photograph torn and tattered and stained,
and fading to yellow in a brown leather frame?"
Eric Bogle -
No Man's Land

 

I propose that the best way to understand the 24th Michigan is to understand the men who lived, fought, and died within it. The narrative of each man's life will serve to further define the social community of the Regiment. These biographies will also examine how the Regiment and the Civil War impacted the men in his later life. Ultimately, I would like to have detailed biographies for a significant percentage of the soldiers. Currently, I have biographies for over 100 men, which equates to only about 5% of the total number of men who served with the unit. This project will be monumental, and may take years to adequately complete. In the meantime, the featured soldier mechanism allows me to share the results of my research.

Each week I will create one or more pages dedicated to individual soldiers. The pages will be styled after the Gallery: Faces of an Era feature in Civil War Times Illustrated. Many of these men will be soldiers for whom I have some new and insightful material. Others will be men whose descendants have contacted me. I'll try to be fairly balanced in my selection of featured soldiers and give representative coverage. As my research progresses, I plan to update each biography page to reflect any additional information gathered. If you have any suggestions for soldiers that you would like to see featured, please drop me a line! Please be patient, however. The backlog of featured soldier requests is quite long.

I am instituting some long needed changes that will make the website much easier to navigate. Henceforth, I will use icons to signify at glance what sorts of information is available on each featured soldier page. In addition to basic service and biographical information, the following icons indicate additional content.  Please note that the men are listed under the company they to which they belonged when they left the regiment, either by muster-out, discharge or death.

= One or more photographs of the soldier

= Primary Documents written by the soldier

= One or more descendants listed on page

= Additional Material that does not fall into one of the above categories.

updated 21 December 1999

Thanks to the people at BeSeen, you can now search the complete text of the entire website. This should prove useful to researchers and genealogists. Give it a try and let me know what you think!

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Ribbon photograph courtesy of Jerry Householder, Channel Books. Used with permission

Last Updated: 12/25/00
Webmaster: Rob Richardson
robr@advnet.net
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