The Civil War in Missouri

First, I want to say yikes and wow! 324 visitors already! Looks like I'd better get posting!

There's so much I want to put here, but I know that with this kind of blog it's best to keep each post limited to one topic (and I'm terrible at sticking to one topic). After exchanging a couple of posts with a fellow Missouri Musick, I thought I would post a bit about a couple of my Civil War families.

I'm by no means an expert on the Civil War in Missouri, but I do get the idea that it was pretty nasty--no big battles, but lots of families fighting other families within the same communities or counties--a little like Iraq today, maybe. Think Kansas bushwhackers. A lot of the older men didn't enlist into regular units for either side, but banded together into home guards to try to protect their families, farms, and businesses. These groups were called Enrolled Missouri Militia if they were Union. I'm sorry to say I can't remember what they were called if they were Confederate. Men who served with the Enrolled Missouri Militia or the Confederate equivalent weren't considered regular soldiers and weren't eligible for pensions, so they often don't show up on Civil War sites.

BUT--If you have a male Missouri ancestor who was alive during that time, you might try looking for him here: http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/soldiers/ This is one of the State of Missouri's on-line searchable databases (and how I wish more states had these online!), and covers Missouri soldiers from the War of 1812 through World War I. One nice thing about these records is you can just plug in a county and indicate which conflict you're interested in, and it will pull up all the records for the county, so if your ancestor's name got spelled differently or transcribed differently, you might still be able to find him--or his cousin or brother-in-law or some relative you didn't know you had.

Another place to look for Missouri Civil War-related information is the index of Missouri's Union Provost Marshall Papers 1861-1866. http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/provost/default.asp This is incomplete--261 of 300 rolls of microfilm, according to the site--but in progress. I need to do more reading to really get what it was the Provost Marshall did, but there's no telling what you might find here. For instance, I found this entry:

Moberly, Wm. E.
Chariton
Brunswick
Peter Abee, currently on trial, is a good and loyal man
08-23-1864
F 1213

My guess is that "Peter Abee" is actually "Peter Agee" in part because I'm not aware of any Abees in Chariton County (there were Abees, but they seem to have been mostly in North Carolina and Ohio in 1860), and in part because there was a Peter Agee (my 2nd cousin 4x removed) living in Brunswick at this time. What's interesting about this is that Peter came from a slave-holding family, though his name isn't in either the 1850 or 1860 Slave Schedules, and Moberly served as a Colonel in the Chariton Co. EMM. The microfilms are part of NARA records, and I assume one could request copies, so getting a copy of this statement is on my "to do" list.

I was actually going to talk about the two families I've done the most Civil War research on, but this is already too long, so I'll save it for later.