Military Memories: Figuring out who served in which war

While work continues in the background on our Farrell's Connections project (see some previous posts) I'm following the GeneaBloggers writing prompt for the month of May with short posts on Military Memories, from Jennifer Holik. One of the things that stumps me and gets in my way is trying to figure out which ancestors might have served in, say, the Revolutionary War or the Civil War. Have to confess to ignoring the Spanish-American War entirely. At least I've kept a list of Revolutionary War Patriots on a big post note next to the desktop computer as I stumble into them. But really, isn't that kind of pathetic? There must be a better way.

This morning I read a blog post with the solution to this problem from Michele Simmons Lewis who writes the helpful blog, "Ancestoring". Her post provided a very useful link to another blog run by Ancestry.com with a beautiful chart of each major war and the war years with a corresponding range of birth years. The Ancestry blog says:

You know you should look for military records for your ancestor, but what war did he serve in? Our friends over at Fold3 created this handy little infographic to use as a rule of thumb. There are exceptions to every rule, but this will get you started!

 

 

OK, now just to be clear, click here to get to the infographic. I'd love to post it here for your immediate enjoyment but also want to respect copyright of the Ancestry folks.

 

Thanks Michele!! I can not even begin to tell you how many times I've sat here counting on fingers trying to figure out if it was possible a particular ancestor served. Now if Randy Seaver over at Genea-Musings would just come up with some super slick way to search our tree programs for possible candidates... problem solved!

 

 

Enoch Clise (1843-1896), served in the Civil War, my second great aunt's husband who was mayor

of Frostburg twice. Frostburg is the little mountain town in Western Maryland where my  recent ancestors came from. Nice photo, huh?

 

 

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