Photos of 89th Illinois Infantry Regiment monuments on the Chickamauga battlefield by Tom Pearson.
Click on a photo to see a larger version of it.

Researching Your Illinois Civil War Ancestor:

Part 2- Enlistment, Bounties, Photographs, & Correspondence

The Fourth Step: Enlistment Papers, Bounties, and Newspapers

A common way to alert potential recruits that a regiment was forming was to place an advertisement resembling a modern-day poster in local newspapers, or to paste such advertisements to telegraph poles or in the windows of stores or post offices. If you know where a man was living when he enlisted in an Illinois Civil War regiment, it may be possible to find such an enlistment poster in a local newspaper.

A great source for 19th century Illinois newspapers is the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (see list of Web Sites of Interest). You can check to see if they own a newspaper for the city or county your ancestor lived in by using a website maintained by the Illinois Newspaper Project (see list of Web Sites of Interest). This database is searchable by newspaper title, city or county the newspaper was published in, and by several other criteria. Search returns include a list of which cooperating libraries own the newspaper in question, including the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.

The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library maintains a card file which lists appearances in various Illinois newspapers of news items, editorials, etc. about particular Illinois Civil War regiments. You can sometimes find letters to the editor from Illinois soldiers in this manner.

When he enlisted in an Illinois regiment, a man signed an enlistment paper. Enlistment papers can be hard to come by, but you can check with the Illinois State Archives (see list of Web Sites of Interest) and a local historical society just in case. He was also paid any bonus due to him for joining that regiment. These signing bonuses, or bounties, were paid as an inducement to get men to enlist in spite of the low pay for an enlisted man ($13 per month for a private, at a time when an unskilled laborer could make $1 per day). Bounties could be paid at the federal, state, county, township, and even the town level. Bounties early on were fairly low ($25-$75), but by late 1864 in some localities were as high as $1,000. Federal bounties paid or outstanding are often noted in a man's Compiled Military Service Record (CMSR). Some Illinois counties (and, in some cases, townships and/or cities) kept good records of bounties paid. Such records have in some cases been microfilmed, and are available through the IRAD (Illinois Regional Archives Depositories) system (see list of Web Sites of Interest).

The Fifth Step: Soldier Photographs, Letters, Diaries, & Memoirs

Photography in fact existed when the Civil War began, and some soldiers did have their photographs taken as a keepsake for relatives at home. Who was most likely to have his picture taken? An officer more so than an enlisted man, because officers were paid more and generally had more leisure time. A Union soldier, more so than a rebel soldier, because Union soldiers were paid with greater regularity than were their rebel counterparts. A soldier stationed in a big city rather than a man at the front lines, because photographers were more likely to have studios there than in rural area because of the bulky equipment necessary at that time to take photographs.

There are several good sources of Illinois Civil War soldier photographs. Foremost is the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (see list of Web Sites of Interest). They have a large collection of such photographs. Contact them to see if they have a photograph of a particular soldier, or of soldiers from a particular regiment. They make can prints of selected photographs- contact them for fees and further information.

A second collection of Civil War soldier photographs is held by the U.S. Army Military History Institute in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania (see list of Web Sites of Interest). This collection includes many photographs of Illinois Civil War soldiers. They have a searchable database of these photographs (database includes brief descriptions of photos, not thumbnails). Selected photographs can be reproduced in some cases- contact them for fees and further information.

Many soldiers wrote letters home during the war, and Illinois soldiers were no exception. Writing letters home and reading letters received from relatives and friends at home was the number one pastime of soldiers in camp on both sides. Some soldiers also kept diaries during the war, or penned a memoir sometime after the war. Possible sources of such letters, diaries, and memoirs are descendents of soldiers, state and county historical societies, and state and local public libraries (see list of Web Sites of Interest).

In addition to writing letters to friends and relatives at home, some men wrote home with accounts of the regiment's exploits to a local newspaper. The best source of Illinois newspapers is the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (see list of Web Sites of Interest). A local public library or historical society may have one or more newspapers for that locality.

Text and photos © copyright 2004 by Thomas A.  Pearson. All rights reserved.  Last revised: 17 March 2006.