The Tennessee Civil War Veterans Questionnaires (Volumes 1-5)

By: Gustavus W. Dyer & John T. Moore, Orig. Pub. 1985, 5 volumes 2,473 pages, Hard Cover, ISBN #0-89308-221-X.  Veterans of the Civil War have long been dead and with their passing were stories and memories of people and places...Memories of lives offered for their homeland.  This set of books, Tennessee Civil War Questionnaires, helps to preserve some of this history.  It is the publication of responses to questionnaires that were sent to Tennessee Civil War veterans in 1914-1915 and again in 1920.  Veteran who responded included not only those who served in Tennessee units and were still living in other states..... and some men who enlisted in other states and who had moved to Tennessee by the time of the survey.  Although the questionnaires differed somewhat in the order of information requested, the responses generally included the veteran's place of residence, age, place of enlistment, unit, education, occupations, further information about the origin of his family, his personal property, and land owned before the war by the veteran and his father.  In addition, the veterans gave their opinion of social conditions before the war including slavery, an account of their war experiences, and their occupation after the war.  They were also asked to list names of their Civil War comrades.  These interviewed veterans came from all social classes, and their answers varied from short and barely literate annals of the poor farmer to perceptive assessments of pre-war social conditions and detailed autobiographies of well-educated sons of planters, artisans and merchants.  This cross-section of human experience makes the material useful to historians as well as to the genealogists pursuing information about lives of specific ancestors.  Both the Federal and Confederate sections have full-name indexes of more than 1,600 veterans, their family members and associates.......