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| Title: | The American Civil War |
| Notice: | Please read all replies 1.* before writing here. |
| Moderator: | SMURF::BINDER |
|
| Created: | Mon Jul 15 1991 |
| Last Modified: | Tue Apr 08 1997 |
| Last Successful Update: | Fri Jun 06 1997 |
| Number of topics: | 141 |
| Total number of notes: | 2129 |
112.0. "Age requirement???" by TNKSYS::RMUMFORD () Fri Jan 14 1994 15:36
Cross posted in the Genealogy notes conference...
I have a question:
What was the official age requirement to enlist in the Army during the
ACW? (union) Specifically, my GGGrandfather enlisted in the 148th Pa
Inf. in 1862. Family tradition, and his later application for pension,
have it that he was 16. His enlistment record states 21. In the Census
records for that county in 1860, he was listed as being 19, and the
1850 census has him as 9, so 21 would have been correct in 1862 (born
1841). This leaves me with a problem: if 21 was his correct age, why,
some 40 years later, would he put down the wrong birthday? (1846, 5
years difference, which would have made him appear younger than he
actually was.) I could understand 1 or 2 years, some people lost
track, specially if they couldn't read/write. But 5? I could also
understand someone wanting to represent himself as older, to get his
pension, but younger? To further confuse the issue, his record of
discharge, in 1865, 3 yrs. later, still has him as 21.
Any opinions welcomed.
Thanks,
Robert
| T.R | Title | User | Personal
Name | Date | Lines |
|---|
| 112.1 | | GUCCI::RWARRENFELTZ | Shine like a Beacon! | Fri Jan 14 1994 18:20 | 2 |
| Maybe the record-keeping error wasn't really his fault...he could have
been one of our earlier victims of the bureaucracy.
|
| 112.2 | Age Eighteen | NEMAIL::RASKOB | Mike Raskob at OFO | Mon Jan 17 1994 11:54 | 22 |
| RE .0:
The official age for enlistment in the Union army was 18. There
are records of young men writing "18" on a piece of paper and putting
it in their shoe so that when they went to enlist they could truthfully
say "I'm over 18". Many men younger than 18 did enlist. (There were
some quite young boys who made it in by various means. Possibly the
youngest sergeant in the U.S. Army was a 13-year-old named John Clem,
who got his stripes for bravery at Chickamauga, but he was unusually
young.)
Remember that most enlistments, at least for the first couple of
years, happened in someone's home town, where people knew you - though
the official doing the enlisting was probably an 'outsider'. There
probably was no cross-check of records (and the existence of things
like birth certificates was spotty), so whatever got written down on
the muster roll was "official", and it's quite possible that either the
individual or the paperwork was wrong - and I doubt on discharge that
anyone checked back to the age at mustering in!
MikeR
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