The National Park Service has maintained a website for years where people can type in a name, typically of an ancestor, and get fairly good records of the Civil War service of that person. I have used it many times in writing about both officers and men who served in both the Confederate Army and the Union Army. Beginning at the end of February that service no longer has anyone updating or maintaining it!
The National Park Service describes the site: “The Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System (CWSS) is a database containing information about the men who served in the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War.” At the bottom of the introductory paragraph are the words: “Please Note: This database is no longer maintained and updated.” Kevin Levin discovered this and posted about it on Substack at Civil War Memory. Before he posted about this, I think that few people knew it had been de-staffed.
The site is still up here, but it has now been relegated to the past and will not have new data or articles added to it.
Over the years, the National Park Service staff have added searchable functions for researching Confederate Civil War prisoners at Point Lookout, a database of 18,000 Black Civil War sailors who served in the Navy, and a way to search for Civil War regiments. New developments are now finished.
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I have used this database many many times to find soldiers whether Union or Confederate and the hopes of identifying these soldiers this database has even helped me secure stones from the VA it is a shame that it is no longer manded I hope that in the can be resolved and it will go forward from where it left off.
Is the database going to be elimenated or just not updated? The CWSS website listed 8 partner organizations who were also involved in the project. If NPS isn’t going to update or maintain the database, why not approach the partners to see if they would have an interest in keeping the project active.
It looks like it will still be available but not updated or developed.