April 21, 2016
Obituaries have been reprinted in anthologies like this one: North Carolina Civil War Obituaries, Regiments 1 – 46. Compiler, Editor: E.B. Munson. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015. 243 p. Softcover. pISBN 978-1-4766-6222-0. $39.95.
This compilation is particularly effective since Munson has grouped these obituaries by regiment.
This lets family historians quickly see if obituaries of the soldiers serving with their ancestors contain more insights about the battles and experiences they shared together during the Civil War.
E. B. Munson is the prolific author of more than 50 books on North Carolina genealogy and local history published since 1998. He retired in 2014 from the Joyner Library at East Carolina University.
Munson found these obituaries in 22 North Carolina newspapers and the Confederate Veteran magazine. In contrast, GenealogyBank has 171 North Carolina newspapers – including a few of the newspapers covered in this book.
Genealogists will want to use this book in tandem with GenealogyBank as a way to verify the reprinted text and as a tool to quickly find the obituaries of others from specific regiments.
Here is an obituary that appears both in GenealogyBank and in this book. Notice that Munson has edited and annotated the text of the original newspaper obituary.
This is how that same obituary appears in the Munson book.
Munson has annotated the text by skillfully researching and adding the information on Robson’s infantry company and regiment – though I would have preferred that this information was added in brackets to clearly show that it was not original to the newspaper obituary text. Also, there is some variation in the punctuation from the newspaper obituary to the text in this book – and an unfortunate typo in the last line where the word “meet” is changed to “met.”
Bottom Line: Highly recommended. Munson’s book is essential for all North Carolina genealogists and military history buffs. It will be used and relied on in libraries with serious genealogical collections and all libraries with Southern and Civil War collections. It is a must-purchase.
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