Grand Army of the Republic, Department of Illinois: Transcription of the Death Rolls, 1879-1947

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The Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.) was founded in 1866 in Illinois and became the largest association of Civil War Union veterans. The G.A.R.’s national membership reached its peak in 1890 at 409,489; membership in the Department of Illinois reached its peak in 1891 at 32,984. As the veterans died, the membership inevitably declined. The national membership dropped to 213,901 in 1910 and 16,597 in 1930. The last surviving G.A.R. member died in 1956. (See Appendix C for a roster of the annual membership of the Department of Illinois and the national organization.)

Those eligible for membership were: “Soldiers and sailors of the United States Army, Navy or Marine Corps, who served between April 12, 1861, and April 9, 1865, in the war for the suppression of the Rebellion, and those having been honorably discharged therefrom after such service, and of such state regiments as were called into active service and subject to the orders of U.S. General Officers, between the dates mentioned. No person shall be eligible to membership who has at any time borne arms against the United States.”

The G.A.R. was organized in departments, most of which comprised one state. The departments published annual reports detailing their activities for the preceding year. The Proceedings of the 14th Annual Encampment of the Department of Illinois, Grand Army of the Republic, published in 1880, was the first to contain a death roll of the department’s members, or “comrades.” (This death roll contains only 12 names.) Thereafter, death rolls were published annually in the Proceedings, with the exception of the years 1883 to 1887. The final death roll for the Department of Illinois appears in the Proceedings of the 81st Annual Encampment, published in 1947.

To compile these death rolls, the department requested each of the local chapters, known as “posts,” to submit a death roll of its members. Compliance with this request varied from post to post and year to year; some posts submitted incomplete rolls or none at all. The department death rolls published in the Proceedings usually contain the comrade’s name, rank, company and regiment (or ship), date of death, and the number of the post to which he belonged. The comrade’s age is occasionally included as well, and the Proceedings for the years 1926 to 1929 include place of burial. The Proceedings for the years 1898 to 1910, 1913 to 1923, and 1925 to 1927 contain death rolls for the Illinois Soldiers and Sailors Home at Quincy, including widows of veterans; the Proceedings for the years 1904 to 1909 contain death rolls for the Danville branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers. Occasionally, a member is listed with his G.A.R. post and also with the Quincy or Danville home, which explains the duplicate entries appearing in this transcription.

In transcribing these death rolls, every effort has been made to record the information accurately and completely, thus it is not necessary to consult the original death rolls for additional information. Since the ranks and regiments in the original death rolls were not recorded in a uniform manner, the compilers of this transcription have standardized this information. For example, in the original death rolls, the 10th Illinois Infantry is variously recorded as “10th Illinois Infantry,” “10th Infantry, Illinois,” and “10th Ill. Inf.” These entries have been consistently recorded as “10th Ill. Inf.” When the compilers of this transcription had any doubt regarding the correct interpretation of an entry, the information was recorded exactly as it appears in the original death roll. To facilitate sorting, names such as “Von Holt” and “Le Grave” have been recorded as “VonHolt” and “LeGrave,” respectively. When a comrade’s age or place of burial is included in the original death roll, this information has been recorded in parentheses in the “Death Date” column. In rare cases entries in the original death rolls contain additional information regarding a comrade. In these cases this information has been transcribed in its entirety in Appendix D. The compilers of this transcription have added several cross references, and information supplied by the compilers which is not in the original death rolls appears in brackets. The final column contains the number and year of the Proceedings from which the entry was extracted. Appendix A contains a roster listing the number, name, and location of each post.

Important note regarding the recording of the death date in this transcription... The death rolls in the Proceedings are stated to contain the deaths for the year preceding its publication. The death roll in each Proceedings usually contains a title on the first page which reads “Death Roll for the Year ....” Within this death roll, entries for each comrade usually contain the month and day of the death, but not the year. In this transcription, the year from the title of the death roll  has been supplied for each entry in that death roll. For example, the thirty-fourth annual encampment of the Department of Illinois was held May 3-4, 1900. The death roll published in the Proceedings of the 34th Encampment is titled “Roll of the Dead, 1899." A death date of “January 10" in this death roll has been recorded in this transcription as “January 10, 1899.” However, in some cases, it appears likely that the death roll includes some submissions of deaths from the early months of the same year of the publication of the Proceedings, in addition to those from the year preceding the publication. (i.e., The death date “January 10" in the “Roll of the Dead, 1899," published in the Proceedings of the 34th Encampment, may actually be a record of a death that occurred on January 10, 1900, which would have been recorded in this transcription as occurring on January 10, 1899.) These cases appear to be infrequent.

This transcription, compiled primarily from Proceedings in the holdings of the Illinois State Historical Library (Springfield), contains records of more than 32,000 comrades, who served in Civil War units from thirty-six states. (A statistical summary of the states from which these comrades served appears in Appendix E.)