cvm1Confederate Veteran magazine, published monthly from 1893 to 1932, is a great and sometimes overlooked resource for information about Southern soldiers in the Civil War.

You can find articles about local Confederate veterans’ organizations, biographical sketches, anecdotes, personal histories, literary works, obituaries and photographs. You also can find lists of subscribers for Confederate memorials that can help you locate an ancestor in a certain time and place.

Fortunately, there is an online index that can help you find what you are looking for.

Library of Virginia: This is a fully searchable index to the personal names of Confederate soldiers as they appear in the magazine. Each of the more than 11,000 entries contains the volume and the page number where the article can be found. Depending on the type of article, the index may include:

  • Birth date
  • Death date
  • Place of death
  • Rank and military unit
  • Other info

Take the index info you find and go to the University of Pennsylvania Online Books Page. Here you will find links to digitized volumes of most issues of Confederate Veteran at Duke University Libraries. You can view the volumes online or download them in various forms. The volumes are for 1892-1923 and 1932. Volumes 1924-1931 are missing.

You may be able to obtain microfilm of the missing volumes from Family Search. The website can tell you how to access the information from the original magazine by going to the Family History Library Catalog or contacting other libraries that have the collection of volumes.

As with all sources, double-check any facts you find in the magazine. For example, I found an obituary for Francis M. Poore that lists his birth place as Virginia. In fact, he was born in Mississippi.

Give the Confederate Veteran a try and see what you come up with.