This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Classification: Query Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/rw/xhC.2ACE/751.1.2.1 Message Board Post: You've asked an important question, and I'm glad you presented it for others to consider. Over a three-year period I searched for men of potential military age on the 1860 federal population census of Barbour County Ala. Results after several thousand attempts were a bit short of three thousand matches. Several men's names appeared in records of multiple units, so you might expect to see that. I'll briefly review the basics of my research method. Start with a particular county such as DeKalb or Marshall and exhaust your possibilities there before moving on to another. Attempting to search multiple areas will quickly become confusing and may discourage you. Select a county in which you can find good resources, and use that to train yourself in how to research the census and military records. Next, review the county census to see which males were of "military" age during 1861-1865. I found the age range 12-46 to work well. Sometimes men older than 46 in 1860 enrolled, but these were few and far between. As for adolescents, rarely does anyone younger than 12 in 1860 appear in ANY military unit. Age is a strong factor: if you find two men on a county census named Anson Bradley, but see only one CSA military record, look at their ages. If one's in his late teens and another's in his late thirties, it's a safe bet the younger Anson Bradley actually served. You need to know what companies were recruited in your target county. Nearly every military company was recruited in and around a particular community. If that community existed near county lines, you'll find men from each county in the company. As a rule of thumb, 75% of the members of any given company lived within a ten mile radius of their assembly or muster point. Of course there are exceptions, but start by looking in just those companies. How do you determine which companies were recruited from what counties? The answer usually requires some work on your part. You may find a publication or a website that lists companies recruited in and around a particular county. I can look a list of Alabama companies and tell you where each was from, but that's because I've spent years working with Alabama Confederate records. One day I'd like to have checklists for each Alabama county like my Cherokee County website: http://www.rootsweb.com/~alcherok/p-index.htm but they're not available yet. Ken Jones has a good website on Alabama that will answer a number of state-related questions regarding the war. Jim Martin maintains a number of state-based Civil War message boards. They seem to attract responses from a large number of knowledgable people. You might just ask about a family member or two from a particular county. It really helps to know where they lived in 1860 and a full name or at least a middle initial. Sometimes people will offer that they *may* have an ancestor named John Smith or John Smitherman; don't know his age or where he lived, but he may have been in the Civil War: can anyone help? There aren't going to be any answers; not polite ones, anyway. Jim offers some suggestions for how to pose questions on his FAQ page: http://history-sites.com/alcwmb/faq_al.htm I hope this helps answer more questions than it raises.