New York State Militia
Officers Prior To 1858

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Last names begin with letters A - L
Last names begin with letters M - Z
*These are extremely large pages (1MB each)

Excel Spreadsheets, ordered by section are here.

About this collection

This is a collection of index cards. The collection is separated into 85 sections. Each card lists last name, first name, rank, and unit. Each card also refers to a page in a resource called Register "B." (No amount of research has determined exactly what this Register "B" actually is. If someone knows what and where this resource is please contact us.)

Within each section, cards are sorted alphabetically by last name. This project was done to help find particular names regardless of section.

This is a scan of a typical card from Section 54.

Because time was an issue the only fields we recorded were last name, first name, rank and the section. Many times the cards in each section refer to different types of units. For instance, in the 1st section, there were cards from the 1st Infantry, 1st Artillery, 1st Rifles, 1st Light Infantry, 1st Separate Battalion of Calvary, 1st Heavy Artillery, and the 1st Separate Company. Only the highest rank on each card was captured in our project.

In 1858 the New York State Militia was reorganized. For the organization of the State Militia in 1857 you can refer to the New York Adjutant General's Report for that year. The relevant pages are here:
Organization of the New York State Militia in 1857

Spelling

Spelling was not standardized at this time. This is especially true for names. Both first and last names were often spelled differently from one person the to the next. In fact there is one person in Section 52 who spelled his first name three different ways:

Summers, Reeson, Captain
Summers, Reson S., Ensign
Summers, Rezen, Lieutenant

Please keep in mind that just looking for the most common way of spelling a name may not be the way the person you are looking for is listed.

In almost every case we have not corrected any spelling, except in very obvious examples such as when the card has "Samucl" we have entered "Samuel."

Thanks

Much of this work was performed by three high school interns working as part of their requirement for the class Participation in Government. They are Sean Murphy, Emma St. Jacques, and Dylan Till.

Proceed to name listing

Excel Spreadsheets, ordered by section are here.