Re: Andersonville - 11th Vermont Infantry
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In reply to:
Andersonville - 11th Vermont Infantry
M Hartz 11/03/00
If you got xeroxes of the papers in Lewis' military service file from the National Archives, there should be included a prisoner of war slip on which government scribes entered every notation they found in the prison records.Typically an entry just reads "sent to Richmond" or "sent to Andersonville" with a date after it.The Pension Office actually hired armies of scribes in the 1880s and 1890s in order to abstract every last scrap of war-related paper onto individual record cards, which were then assembled into individual envelopes under the soldier's name.Men were writing in for pensions all the time and alleging all sorts of war-related service and injuries, so abstracting the records was a self-defense measure on the Pension Office's part.Bottom line: the military service records are absolutely comprehensive.There are no un-indexed collections of war-related personnel records.
You have to understand that moving prisoners further south became a very arduous procedure during the spring campaign of 1864.The Northern government had called off prisoner exchange the previous autumn as a way of starving out the South -- even if this meant sacrificing tens of thousands of Yanks to death in Southern prisons. Collateral damage and all that...!
Lewis was actually one of the more fortunate prisoners.He was paroled through Savannah in November, right after exchanges were temporarily authorized.He could just as well have wound up at Florence, S.C., where many other 1st Vt. Hy. Art. men found themselves.The bulk of the Florence men didn't get out until the end of February 1865.
Can't help you with photos.
Can I assume that Lewis' family name was originally Gagné and that he was of French-Canadian descent.Years of doing F-C genealogy have left me with a pretty good ability to sniff out anglicized surnames.
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Re: Andersonville - 11th Vermont Infantry
M Hartz 11/24/00