What are the Compiled Service Records (CSRs)?
The original muster rolls (the actual rolls of paper used to record if soldiers were present, wounded / killed, etc. during the Civil War), returns, and registers which made up the month-by-month records of the Civil War’s armies are today housed in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and scattered about the country at various States’ Archives. Usually, it’s not possible to work with the original documents directly due to their age and fragility. In fact, by the 1890s, the surviving muster rolls had already started to deteriorate, and the War Department commissioned the massive project of the transcription of these records, which record the military service of literally millions of Civil War veterans. A large team of copyists worked for several decades on this project, the result of which, in the pre-computer age, was a series of cards, each one containing (mostly) handwritten notes about specific events in the military career of each soldier. These cards were placed into an env
