Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) – 4 – Records Project of the SUVCW

This post is the fourth in a series of posts is about how to locate record the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). The first post contains information about the GAR.

The Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, mentioned in a previous blog post about the GAR, have an ongoing project to populate a database with the locations of available GAR records for every chapter. It is the GAR Records Project.

From that page, you can select “Explore the GAR by state”.

I clicked on New York.

Following the other links on the page led me to some interesting websites. There is a website with digitized records for one post. Another website contains information about GAR posts in New York organized by county.

There was a listing for the GAR chapter in Gowanda.

There is also a link to a listing of GAR posts in New York State.

Click on the GAR Records Catalog.

From here you can download the pdf document (using the icon with the downward arrow).

Alternately, you can go Selecting the “Go Directly to the Catalog”. As of this blog post, the database was last updated in November 2015.

Select your state on the tab on the bottom opens a spreadsheet for the state.

Some of the records show that they have been digitized and are available at Ancestry.com.

But there is no record for the Gowanda Post #359.

I did copy all of the spreadsheet into an Excel document, but the cells had to be reformatted to see all the text. The spreadsheet is presented by a script, so there were some issues saving the page.

Give this website a try and let me know how you do!