South Carolina, 1861–1865

The rosters

Every South Carolina service card in the National Park Service index, arranged by unit and by name, with the unit histories and battle summaries that index carries, the microfilm each card sits on, and the state's own 1898 roll book as it is transcribed.

141,813service cards
110,106distinct names
247units
413company rolls of 1898

Find a name

Takes you to the page for that surname, listing every card under it with its unit, company and ranks. Spelling is the index's, so try the variants: the same man can be filed as Abercrombie and Abbarcrombie.

What is here

Units247 regiments, battalions, companies and batteries, each with its history, its battles, its microfilm and every man on its cards.Names141,813 cards by surname, in the index's own spelling, with the alternate spellings it cross-files.Battles54 engagements the unit histories cite, with the National Park Service summary of each and the South Carolina units that fought there.The 1898 rollsThe state's Confederate Rolls of South Carolina: 413 company rolls with age, county, wounds and fate, 229 men transcribed so far.Colored troopsThe regiments of United States Colored Troops raised at Hilton Head, Beaufort and Port Royal, filed by the index under the U.S.C.T. rather than the state.Sources and methodWhere each column comes from, what the index can and cannot tell you, how the microfilm rolls were matched, and how to cite a card.

What a card is

The National Archives' General Index to Compiled Service Records has one card for each man in each unit he served in: name, unit, company, the rank he entered with and the rank he left with. That is all it holds. A man who served in two units has two cards; two men with one name have one line each and nothing to tell them apart. The rosters keep to that. They list cards, never "people," and they do not guess which cards belong to the same man.

The count is 133,133 Confederate cards and 8,680 Union. The Union cards are the 1st South Carolina Infantry (Colored) as the index files it under the state, together with the six regiments of United States Colored Troops that were raised in South Carolina and are filed under the U.S.C.T. instead; the colored troops page explains that.

For age, county, wounds and fate the index is silent. The state's own 1898 roll book records all of those, company by company, and is being transcribed page by page under the 1898 rolls.

What this is not

It is not the service records. Those are the Compiled Service Records themselves, NARA M267, 393 rolls, and each card here names the index roll (M381) that points into them. It is not a casualty list; the Mercury casualty register is that. And it is not complete for the men of Charleston: the index files a man under the state that raised his unit, so a Charlestonian in a Georgia battery is in Georgia's cards, not these.