Researchers have long relied on the National Park Service’s online “Soldiers and Sailors Database” to search for Civil War ancestors.  Many of those same researchers have discovered, however, that there are significant problems with that system and the search results are often unreliable.

 
Now the NPS has officially abandoned the effort to resolve those problems and have announced on the site that the system will no longer be maintained or updated.

Fortunately, a free replacement is already available to researchers. Over the past two years, thousands of researchers have switched to BetterSoldiersAndSailors.com which allows searching of the same soldiers and sailors database but with a modern search engine.  The new system supports “sounds like” searches, wildcards, logical sorting of search results, and other modern features that were missing from the old system.  It also recognizes common abbreviations in the data like Geo., Wm., and Sam’l that caused many searches on the old system to fail. For those reasons, if you ever failed to find a soldier on the old system, it would be a good idea to try again with BetterSoldiersAndSailors.com.

But there are even more advantages to the new system. If appropriate, it will point you to the online sites where you can find your soldier’s military records.  If those records aren’t online, it offers an easy option to order copies from Gopher Records which is much faster and much less expensive than ordering them directly from the National Archives.  In fact, orders have typically been filled in about two weeks and Gopher Records guarantees that its prices are lower than those of any record retrieval service.

BetterSoldiersAndSailors.com is developed and supported by Gopher Records, LLC.