Roster of Company I, 24th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers

This is not a story in the conventional sense, but it contains thousands of them. Compiled in 1902 by Charles Bean Amory, this roster preserves the names, ages, hometowns, ranks, and fates of every man who served in Company I of the 24th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War. Here you will find the 23-year-old farmer from Worcester who enlisted in 1861 and never came home, the sergeant from Roxbury who re-enlisted three times, the 16-year-old boy who lied about his age to fight. Beyond the names, Amory traces the regiment's path through the war: New Bern, Cold Harbor, the Siege of Petersburg. Each entry is a life crystallized into data: residence, enlistment date, rank, wound or death or survival. For genealogists, this book is a locked door opening into a family story. For historians, it's a prism refracting the broad war into individual faces. For anyone curious about the human texture of Civil War Massachusetts, these pages hold something invaluable: proof that they existed, that they mattered, that someone remembered.