United States National Homes for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, 1866-1938

The National Home (called Asylum up to 1873) for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers was founded in 1865 to look after volunteer soldiers who had been injured or disabled during the American Civil War. Twelve homes were opened across the United States, beginning with the first home in Togus, Maine in 1866.[1]

Home	Location	Date Established
Eastern Branch	Togus, Maine	1866
Central Branch	Dayton, Ohio	1867
Northwestern Branch	Wood, Wisconsin	1867
Southern Branch	Hampton, Virginia	1870
Western Branch	Leavenworth, Kansas	1885
Pacific Branch	Sawtelle, California	1888
Marion Branch	Marion, Indiana	1888
Roseburg Branch	Roseburg, Oregon	1894
Danville Branch	Danville, Illinois	1898
Mountain Branch	Johnson City, Tennessee	1903
Battle Mountain Sanitarium	Hot Springs, South Dakota	1907
Tuskegee Home	Tuskegee, Alabama	1923
Bath Branch	Bath, New York	1929
St. Petersburg Home	St. Petersburg, Florida	1930

Table 1: Chronological year of opening of National Homes for Disables Volunteer Soldiers

Both Ancestry.com and Familysearch.org have the database United States National Homes for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, 1866-1938. It contains almost 400,000 records and the page for each veteran in the registers is divided into four parts: military history, domestic history, home history, and general remarks.  Just over 28,100 of the entries are for men who were born in Ireland. Of those, the Irish county or place of birth is recorded for almost 500 men.

County	No. of records
Dublin	124
Cork (inc. 2 Queenstown)	60
Galway	43
Limerick	32
Tipperary (incl. 1 Templemore)	28
Donegal (incl. Donnegal)	18
Derry/Londonderry	18
Mayo (incl. May & 1 Charlestown)	18
Tyrone	14
Sligo	14
Kilkenny	13
Roscommon (incl. Rosecommon)	12
Waterford	11
Kerry (incl. 1 Killarney)	11
Kildare	8
Cavan (incl. Caven)	6
Antrim	6
Clare	6
Armagh	5
Down	4
Offaly (incl. Kings)	4
Westmeath	4
Monaghan (incl. Monoghan)	3
Leitrim	3
Longford	3
Wexford	3
Wicklow	3
Fermanagh	2
Carlow	2
Laois (incl. Queens)	2
Meath (incl. 1 Navan)	2
Louth	1
Castle Borough, Ireland	1
Clashmore, Ireland	1
Rockville, Ireland	1
Drummond, Ireland	1
Barr, Ireland	1
Kilduff, Ireland	1
Kenmore, Ireland	1
Bangor, Ireland	1
County Carney, Ireland	1
Grey Abbey, Ireland	1
Ardmore, Ireland	1
Clifton, Ireland	1
TOTAL	495

Table 2: No. of records that give Irish county/place of birth

The questions asked on the pro-forma registers changed slightly over the years but a core of questions were asked throughout:[2] (i) military history - time and place of each enlistment, rank, company and regiment, time and place of discharge, cause of discharge, kind and degree of disability, when and where contracted; (ii) domestic history - where born (state or country and town or county), age, height, complexion, color of eyes, color of hair, read and write, religion, occupation, residence subsequent to discharge, marital status/social condition, name and address of nearest relative; (iii) home history - rate of pension, date of admission re-admission and transfer, condition of re-admission, date and discharge of transfer, cause of discharge, date of death, cause of death (iv) general remarks - papers, effects, location of grave and remarks.

Not every question is answered for each resident, especially in the records of those who were admitted to the first few national homes.  However, most questions were usually answered and this is a tremendous amount of detail about one individual, especially in the 19th century. It is also unusual to see a government document ask about the religion of a person.

Entry for Austin Connelly, born about 1810 Dublin, Ireland

To share one example, Austin Connelly entered the Central Branch home in Dayton, Ohio on 13 July 1875. He was born in Dublin, Ireland about 1810. In the United States, he worked as a shoemaker in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He first enlisted in the 109th Pennsylvania volunteers on 22 February 1862 at Philadelphia. He was discharged in 1863 before re-enlisting in the 116th Pennsylvania volunteers in February 1864. A relative was named as John Finnell of Camden, New Jersey. Austin Connelly died on 4 May 1891.[3]

Access this database at Ancestry.com and Familysearch.org.

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[1] National Parks Service. History of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers. Date Unknown.  http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/veterans_affairs/History.html: accessed 28 November 2015.

[2] Questions with strikethrough were asked in later years

[3] "United States National Homes for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, 1866-1938," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:VZ39-D1Y : accessed 28 November 2015), Austin Connelly, 1875; citing p. 5403, Dayton, Ohio, United States, NARA microfilm publication M1749 (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.), roll 32; FHL microfilm 1,547,614.

Chronicling America Newspaper Database

Chronicling America is a website providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages, and is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). NDNP is a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress .[1]

In total, almost 9.5 million pages of digitized newspapers are currently available view. One of the most useful features on the website is the US Newspaper Directory, 1690-Present. This database contains information for over 153,000 newspapers that were published in the U.S. since the 17^th century. You can use many different filter options to search the database, one of which is ethnicity. Using the ‘Irish’ option gives a return of 127 titles. The majority of the titles are from the state of New York, however, in total, newspapers from 16 states are listed. They are:

Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Missouri, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Virginia

The span of years and cities they cover range from the brief to the broad. Some interesting examples include:

The Irish Pennsylvanian (Pittsburg, PA), 1890-1921

The Northwestern Standard (Minneapolis, MN), 1885-1886

The A.O.H. Journal (Richmond, VA), 1878-1881

Just one of these 127 newspapers is digitized and available to view on the website. It is the Kentucky Irish American and you can search editions from 1898-1921.

Chronicling America website

US Newspaper Directory, 1690-Present

List of ethnic Irish newspapers in the directory

You can read other blog posts about newspapers relevant to Irish genealogy research by selecting the ‘newspaper’ label at the end of this post.

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[1] Chroniclingamerica.gov. About Chronicling America. Year Unknown. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/about: accessed 5 May 2015.

Moughty's Research Trips To Ireland

Florida based genealogist Donna Moughty has organized research trips to Ireland for the last number of years. On the trips, she leads and mentors groups of people who want to do research in the main repositories on the island. These trips usually occur in October and she provides an excellent blog commentary about her research exploits. Her posts showcase the fast paced nature of these trips, mixed with the will it takes to fit in as much research as possible in two weeks; one week is in Belfast and the other in Dublin.

The 2014 trip visited all the major repositories: Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Registry of Deeds, National Library of Ireland, National Archives of Ireland, Valuation Office, Registry of Deeds, and the Back To Our Past genealogy conference. She has just recently returned and you can read all the posts, starting here.

You can also read about the 2013 and 2012 trips. Are you thinking of taking a research trip to Ireland? You could do worse than inquire about here 2015 trip!

Florida Snowbirds

This is the time of year when many elderly people from all across the United States and Canada begin to  head to the southern parts of the U.S. to escape the harsh mid-western, northern and Canadian winter. One disadvantage, for those who are genealogy enthusiasts, is that they cannot attend talks, lectures, and workshops that are held by genealogy groups and societies in their home state/country. Florida is probably the most popular place to winter for these "snowbirds." So, what opportunities are available in Florida to attend Irish specific genealogy group and society meetings over the winter months?

The Groups/Societies/Institutions (GSI) database on this website lists all of these types of organizations in the U.S. and Canada that I am currently aware of.* This includes two genealogical societies in Florida. Firstly, there is the Lee County Genealogical Society - Irish Special Interest Group. They meet in Fort Myers, which is on the Gulf Coast side of the state, about a 50 minute drive north of Naples, FL. Secondly, there is The Villages Genealogical Society, which also has an Irish genealogy special interest group. This group is located in north central Florida, about a one hour drive north-west of Orlando.

Therefore, if you are a Florida snowbird, there are opportunities to meet with other Irish genealogy enthusiasts and learn something new.

*If your GSI is not listed, please comment at the end of this post, or on the GSI database webpage, and I will add your organization to the list.