My local library received a new book this week: Confederate Voices by Debbie Stephenson Moore. It’s not a book about the Civil War or the Confederacy, but rather is a collection of biographies, family histories, and organization vignettes with Confederate soldiers from southeast Tennessee and northwest Georgia as the unifying theme.
I like the way the book is organized and laid out. It’s in alphabetical order by surname of the veteran or group name. Each story is usually one page long, although a few are several pages. Confederate Voices draws on pension records, census records, newspaper articles, letters, obituaries, and photographs to flesh out the lives of its subjects.
My second great-grand uncle, James A. McEntire, is an example of a typical biography included in Confederate Voices. It tells when and where he and his wife were born, a bit about his service in the war, where he lived after the war and the state of his health, then death dates and places. It also includes pictures of both James and his wife.
“The O’Neal Family of Polk County, TN” is a six-page chapter that covers the family history of another of my collateral lines – the family of John Silas and Elizabeth (Kendrick) O’Neal. This chapter includes some information about John and paragraphs about most of John and Elizabeth’s children and their families, such as when they were born and died, who they married, and where they migrated to, all interspersed with photos.
In addition to the bios and family histories, Confederate Voices includes chapters on various Confederate cemeteries, chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and Confederate Veteran Camps.
The book includes a table of contents and an index (link to full index here), so it’s easy to find particular names that you might be looking for. If you are researching people in Bradley, McMinn, and Polk counties in Tennessee or Murray and Whitfield counties in Georgia, Confederate Voices is worth checking out.
