Research Resource: Register of Enlistments In U.S. Army

I got an e-mail from Ancestry.com recently that touted some new databases that had been added. Among these was "Registration of Enlistments in the U.S. Army, 1798 --1914. So of course I was interested. I put in the search box a number of my family names, particularly the more unique ones, and turned up nothing. So then I tried the common family names like Johnson and Martin. Still nothing. This made me a little suspicious. I couldn't believe that from 1798 to 1914, for example, only 161 men from Missouri named Johnson had enlisted in the United States Army.

I decided to find out just how many names were actually in the database. I did this by simply leaving the name boxes blank and indicating "United States" in the country box and "any state" and searching. The program reported back that there are something over the 845,000 names in the database. Then I repeated the process placing in the country box the names of countries I thought most likely to have supplied members of the U.S. Army during the time. 1798 -- 1914. Here are the interesting results:

UNITED STATES	845,041
IRELAND	155,122
GERMANY	92,440*
ENGLAND	37,732
CANADA	20,740**
PHILLIPINES	17,005
SCOTLAND	12,083
FRANCE	6,492
RUSSIA	6,195
AUSTRIA	6,107
ITALY	2,396
NETHERLANDS	1,646
POLAND	1,518
TOTAL	1,049,395

*includes 8,329 from Prussia
**includes 10 listed as being from "North America" since Canada was referred to as "British North America"

Are you surprised by these data? I am. More than 10% of the enlistees were born in Ireland. I never would have thought that.

But my purpose was to discover how many records were in the database in order to determine how complete it is. So consider the total number. Except for the Civil War, the Army was fairly small between 1798 and 1914; it could well be 1,050,000 names represents a fairly complete database. But then, it's estimated that during the Civil War, 2,200,000 men served in the Union Army. If that's the case, I reasoned, perhaps most of the records in this database came from the Civil War era. To check this theory, I put in the year box "1863" selected "any country," left all other fields blank, and searched. That yielded a total of 13,568 enlistments. Hmm! Clearly it would take more of an 13,000 enlistments a year to sustain an army of over 2 million. (The total for 1861, the first year of the war, was 29,265).

So perhaps it is that this database contains mostly non-Civil War enlistments. In any event, it's clear that this is not a comprehensive database of U.S. Army enlistments during the period 1798-1914.

Ancestry.com says the original data was found in National Archives Microfilm Publication M233, 81 rolls; Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1780’s-1917, Record Group 94.