The Shapell Roster of Jewish Service in the American Civil War is an ongoing reappraisal of the military service of Jews who served in the Union and Confederate Armies and Navies from 1861 – 1865.  Compiled by a small team of professional researchers who have worked since 2009, the Shapell Roster is a digital history resource that puts at easy reach the records of the thousands of men who served — both those previously recognized for their participation and those who have remained, until now, unidentified.    See: https://www.shapell.org/roster/about/

The Goal: Identify every Jewish soldier and sailor who served in the Union and Confederate Armies and Navies during the American Civil War.

The process is to find sources of proof for both military service and Judaism for each name listed in Simon Wolf’s The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen and also for the names he omitted.

The result is an open-access database with 64 searchable fields of data, 7,000 Union soldier and sailor pages, a bibliography of nearly 3,000 primary and secondary sources, and more than 50,000 historical documents.

The Shapell Roster database consists of a basic and advanced search engine, and individual soldier and sailor pages. The basic search, located on the Roster landing page, searches the name field. The advanced search fields allow the user to easily search according to broad or narrow criteria, such as location of enlistment, place of death, discharge reason, and promotion date.

In 2022, the Shapell Manuscript Foundation published the Shapell Roster’s Union soldier and sailor pages at www.shapell.org/roster/, and will publish the Confederate pages in the future. As the research is ongoing, the Shapell Roster team will continue to add new Union soldiers and sailors and update existing pages with new discoveries. For more information about the Shapell Roster, please visit their FAQ page (https://www.shapell.org/roster/faq/).

Jan Meisels Allen

Chairperson, IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee