"A Visual Look at Irish Veterans in the G.A.R" Topic

"The Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.) was a Union veteran organisation originally founded in 1866. It would eventually become a significant lobby group with major political clout, particularly when it came to veterans affairs. In the State of New York, a number of G.A.R. Posts bore the names of Irishmen who served in the conflict; examples included G.A.R. Post #567 which was named for Thomas Francis Meagher and G.A.R. Post #69 named for James Shields in New York City, and G.A.R. Post #28 in Buffalo named for the McMahons of Corcoran's Irish Legion. I am interested in how many Irishmen joined these posts, and what their military service history and social profile was. I hope to explore these questions graphically in a number of future articles on these ‘Irish-named' G.A.R. Posts. This first one looks at some of the statistics for Thomas Francis Meagher Post #88, which was established in Tompkinsville, Staten Island, New York.

The statistics for the graphics below are taken from the Descriptive Book of Thomas Francis Meagher Post #88 from 1st December 1873, which provides details on a total of 46 Post members. The graphics below focus on breakdown by nationality, job-type and residence. A follow-up piece will examine the service of the men, looking at details such as length of service and branch of service. All the graphs have been generated in Excel based on a database I have created of the Post's members…"

Full article here
link

That's a lot of Irish!. (smile)

Amicalement
Armand

The problem with the graphic is that it's such a small sampling of men – 46 – who came from Staten Island. I'm sure if he did a similar sampling from a unit in Ohio, or wherever, the German numbers would be high too.
You have to use the whole Union army to get a realistic percentage breakdown by nationality.

Interesting point my friend.

Amicalement
Armand

What Ligniere said. There were about 180,000 Irish-born soldiers in the Union army and over 220,000 German-born soldiers. That means that over 20% of the white troops in the federal armies came from those two countries. However, that doesn't necessarily translate into membership in the GAR. It would be interesting to see if there were any studies on the overall membership breakdown. The peak membership was about 490,000 meaning that only about a third of Union veterans ever belonged.

Pretty interesting chart…thanks for that.

Glad you enjoyed it my friend.

Amicalement
Armand