Revolutionary Resources

As I’ve been pushing my way back through the American history timeline, I’ve finally reached the point in my ancestor quest in which I’m running into family members who lived during the time of the Revolutionary War.

Some of those family members actually participated in the military aspects of that Revolution. You know what that means: eligibility for the lineage society known as Daughters of the American Revolution.

Of course, I’m already working on putting together my application on behalf of my patriot ancestor, my fifth great grandfather Zachariah Taliaferro of Virginia. With the arrival of a couple more slips of documentary evidence, it will soon be all over but the shouting.

In the meantime, as I take a look around at all the siblings of each generation’s direct line, I’m noticing several others in the Taliaferro and associated families who merit such recognition, as well. And you know how I am keen on noticing the names populating my family tree—I still have a mystery cousin to tie in to this ancestral line. So I’ve been taking my time, ambling through all the lines.

A while back, I had questioned why it seemed so many of my ancestors from this line had moved from Virginia, through South Carolina, to Georgia. Now that I’m studying that time period in my family’s history, I’m seeing the answer to my own question unfold with every turn of the page of old military rosters.

Remember Benjamin Taliaferro—Zack’s son who stole away his younger brother’s intended? One could have presumed that Ben’s move to Georgia might have been a judicious choice to put space between feuding brothers. According to land records, however, that may have only been a secondary aspect—Benjamin Taliaferro did quite well for himself in the land grants that followed service in the Continental Army. This I was able to find, thanks to the digitized version of the 1941 Roster of Revolutionary Soldiers in Georgia at Ancestry.com.

While I do have subscriptions to both Ancestry.com and Fold3.com—the logical places to go for military records on our ancestors—I’ve found there are all sorts of other online resources for inquiries about our military ancestors from the American Revolution.

Since I’ve been focusing on Georgia land grants in particular, it helped to see that some old publications are digitized and freely accessible at Internet Archive. One, for instance, is Georgia’s Roster of the Revolution, a 1920 compilation of lists of soldiers, sailors, officers and associated parties either enlisting in Georgia or settling in the state after serving in the war.

Remembering that some of my Taliaferro people lived in Virginia at the outbreak of the war, it was helpful to note that Internet Archive also has List of the Revolutionary Soldiers of Virginia, a 1913 publication, as well.

While Ancestry.com has aggregated a set of data collections from the National Archives, which it dubs “U.S. Revolutionary War Rolls, 1775-1783,” there are other places to look for resource lists as well. FamilySearch.org has a wiki, “Revolutionary War Service Records,” which provides several suggestions on places to look for books and records on this topic. Cyndi’s List has compiled a page of over one hundred links—some free, some subscription-based—to online sites containing Revolutionary War data of genealogical significance.

Of course, the obvious other resource is the national website of the Daughters of the American Revolution, which includes the Genealogical Research System, where you can search for specific ancestors’ names.

It’s been a real treat to see these ancestors named in publications of soldiers from the American Revolution. In some cases, the discovery comes with the bonus of records of children included in the family—a further help to confirm my records are correct. Hopefully, some of those additional mentions will help me straighten out some tangled branches or possibly inaccurate assumptions I’ve run across on my way backwards in time. There are still some discrepancies to be tackled as I do my due diligence to get this genealogical record right.