I am looking for a man that died during the Civil War. He was a Confederate soldier and there are not a lot of lists of those soldiers so my search is not going to be a cinch. He died Oct 1, 1836 and served with Arkansas troops. 1) Search http://www.us-civilwar.com/battles.htm to see if there was a battle at that time or shortly before. Answer: not real close. 2) Look for regimental history http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9787/milst1.html and look at those for Arkansas. I learn that his regiment fought in all the battles with Johnson during 1863. Many of these were little skirmishes. 3) A search of possible sites leads me to this wonderful site http://www.couchgenweb.com/civilwar/ and I do a surname search for Bunker. Guess what? There he is and as an extra bonus, so is his brother. So, if you can't find your ancestor by doing surname searches on the regular sites, try going for historical ones that tell you what battles were fought and where, regimental histories as sometimes have rosters. Incidently, my guy was wounded in a battle in 1861 but died of disease in 1863. I got a physical description of him too. This was an easy one but this is just a little "lesson" on where to look for these things. There is a multitude of Civil War sites and you can get overwhelmed. Going to battle and regimental histories sometimes cuts the time down a lot. And sometime you just have to keep plowing through all those sites, one by one. Bette