Sources and method

The index

The cards are the National Park Service's Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System, which indexes the National Archives' General Index to Compiled Service Records — 6.2 million cards for the whole war. This section holds the 133,226 cards the index files under South Carolina, taken on 3 September 2026, together with the cards of the seven United States Colored Troops units raised in the state. Each card is one man in one unit. Search it directly at nps.gov.

The index is a finding aid, and its own site says so: "just an index of the men who served … with only rudimentary information from the service records." It gives no age, no birthplace, no date and no fate. Its "state" is the state that raised the unit, not the man's home. Its spelling is the clerk's, and a card is cross-filed under a second spelling where the clerk thought it useful.

The columns

Name

As the index spells it, surname first.

Also filed as

The index's alternate name, which it records as given name / surname; shown here surname first.

Company

The company letter on the card; F&S is field and staff; two letters mean the card carries both.

Rank in, rank out

The rank the man entered with and the rank he left with, as the card gives them.

M381 roll

The roll of NARA M381, the 35-roll index to the South Carolina compiled service records, on which the card is filmed. The index does not print it in its search results; it appears on each card's own page as "M381 ROLL n," and it follows a fixed relation to the index's internal film number that was checked on every card examined and holds for every one. The roll is alphabetical by surname, roll 1 running Aams to Ayton.

Record

The card's own page on nps.gov.

Unit histories and battles

The histories are the index's, condensed from Joseph H. Crute Jr., Units of the Confederate States Army (1987) for Confederate units and Frederick H. Dyer's Compendium (1908) for Union ones; 73 of the 240 South Carolina units have one. Battle names in a history link to the National Park Service's Civil War Sites Advisory Commission summary of that battle, and the battles page lists the units by that route only.

Matching the muster-roll captions (M861)

NARA M861, Compiled Records Showing Service of Military Units in Confederate Organizations, holds each unit's muster-roll captions and record-of-events cards; South Carolina's are rolls 43 to 48. Each index unit was matched to an M861 caption on structure alone — number, unit type, arm and the commander's name — never on how alike the two strings look. A match that agrees on all four is stated as fact; one that differs by a descriptive word is stated as probable; one that could mean several captions, or none, says so. The descriptive pamphlet for M861 was transcribed from the page images for this, and its roll list is on file in the records system.

The 1898 rolls

Each roll heading in the state's 1898 volume was matched to an index unit the same way, with a short table of the book's battery nicknames (Gist Guard, Marion Light Artillery, Coit's or Chesterfield) against the captains' names the index uses. A match the rule could not make is left blank rather than guessed. The transcriptions follow the records system's standard: the original scan is the authority, the diplomatic reading changes nothing, uncertainty is marked on the row, and a page is a first reading until a second reader has been through it.

What is not here

Sailors: the index's 18,000 African American sailors are not in its live search, and Confederate navy men were never indexed. Prisoners, burials and Medal of Honor records: the same. Any man who served in a unit another state raised. And no person records: two cards with one name are two cards.

Rights and use

The index is a work of the United States government. The 1898 roll book is a public record; the 2012 scans of it are the Richland Library's and are linked, not copied. The unit histories and battle summaries are quoted from the index as the public reference it is. Nothing in this section is offered as a file, by the site's rule; every card can be checked at its source.

To cite a card

National Park Service, Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System, [Surname, Given name], [unit], card [soldier id], citing NARA M381, roll [n]; via Charleston in the War, South Carolina rosters, [page address], read [date].