Hopefully I’ve been here long enough that this won’t be seen as a porn-bot endorsement. I mention for other Dopers who are interested in genealogy and primary sources in history- it’s not limited to genealogy, though that’s what I’m using it for at the moment. It’s footnote dot com. It’s a pay-site ($8 per month or $60/year), but it’s digitized government and official documents, including Confederate army records (though they don’t have every state- luckily I only need Alabama and they have that one).
Hellacool- I’ve gotten medical reports and discharge (and desertion) records on Confederate ancestors (all of whom were lowly privates). I also got the 32 page document where another ancestor applied for his $54 per year Revolutionary War pension, and just for the hell of it the handwritten interrogation notes of Mary Surratt.
Just wanted to share. (If anybody has a particular Confederate ancestor and would like me to get their file while I have access, email me during the next month [I don’t know if I’ll be renewing my membership there or not, but I’m totally enjoying it for now]).
Just to update: the Confederate records (from enlistment to widows pensions) they have are for the states of Virginia, Texas, and Alabama. They’re adding more.
Actually, I’ll believe the government will digitize its [jargon term] Legacy Collections 19 days after I see it. To date, Lexis Nexis and ReadEx, Ancestry dot com, and others have done far more than the Feds in digitizing fed docs. Whenever I need a dead relative’s SSN for paperwork I go here because unless it’s changed in the last year you can’t get the same info from Social Security Administration.
FYI, Heritage Quest has a lot of Revolutionary War stuff - draft records, I think, if that’s good for you. We mostly use Ancestry for, among other reasons, the 1930 census indexing, but sometimes I forget there’s good stuff in Heritage Quest also.