Copyright and image use

What is not ours

Most of what this site shows is a public record, and is cited as one. The photographs are, with few exceptions, scans held by the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the United States Military Academy Library (the Orlando M. Poe Papers). The census schedules are federal records on National Archives microfilm. The 1852 city directory and Ford's register of 1861 are printed books long out of copyright, as are Quincy Gillmore's report of 1865 and John Johnson's volume of 1890. Each is linked to its source so that a reader can go to the original.

Where material belongs to someone else, it is cited rather than reproduced, and the holder's own rights are stated with the citation. Nothing on this site is offered as free to use merely because it appears here.

What is ours

The editorial work is copyright © 2026 Historical Publications LLC, all rights reserved: the transcriptions and the readings behind them, their arrangement and indexing, the captions, chronologies, headnotes and editorial notes, the colorized interpretations of the photographs, and the design and code of the site. A transcription read line by line from a manuscript is original work, and is protected as such.

What you may do

• View, share and link to any page here.
• Quote a short passage with attribution to charlestoninthewar.com.
• Cite a transcribed line — with its sheet, line and frame. That citation is exactly what it is there for, and a researcher who checks it against the image is doing what the site was built to allow.

What you may not do

• Copy, scrape, mirror or republish the transcriptions, the indexes, or any substantial part of this site.
• Use this site's content to build, populate or train a competing database, index or search service.
• Reproduce the colorized images. They are interpretive work, not the historical record; the black-and-white master scan is the record, and it is the public one.
• Reproduce the site's design, layout or page templates.

The transcriptions are published here to read, not as files to take away. There is no bulk download of the census or the directory, and that is deliberate. The records underneath them are public and are linked; the reading of them is ours.

If you believe we have infringed a copyright

Write to [email protected], or telephone 800-777-1862, with:

• the material you object to, identified by its URL;
• the work you say it infringes;
• your name, mailing address, telephone number and email;
• a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is unauthorized;
• a statement that what you have written is accurate, and that you are the copyright owner or are authorized to act for them;
• your signature, physical or electronic.

Valid complaints are reviewed promptly and the material removed where appropriate.

Last reviewed 2 September 2026.