New Orleans' Confederate Usticesi and The National Park Service


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Posted by StanN ( Ingargiola ) on 12 MAR 2013 13:58:32

During this 150th Anniversary, 2011-2015, of the Civil War, if you find a New Orleans ancestor listed on this site's " Usticesi in the Confederate Army " ( Resource Page ) you may be interested to see that person's name and military service is also preserved for future generations to see by an agency of the US government. In the 1880's, the US Army required every state to provide a compilation of all its soldiers and sailors who participated in the War, both Union and Confederate. From the handwritten Army index cards that were created in the 1880's, the National Park Service began in 1992 the lenghthy task of transferring the information to a computer database. If you want to see an ancestor from Ustica on this permanent national record, visit " www.nps.gov/civilwar " and in the center of the page is a box " Find a Person " that will lead you to your ancestor's information. Since the index cards were handwritten from submitted handwritten records, some names will not come up if they were recorded with mispellings. My own ancestor could not be found by his true last name spelling ( Ingargiola ) but by trying an alternative spelling ( Ingargiole ) his record was indeed in the database. So you may want to keep this in mind if you do not make an exact hit the first time. to his site's own military list, the impression is given that the April 2, 1862 muster roll was created as a final or surrender muster roll after New Orleans was captured by Union warships. In actually New Orleans remained in Confederate control until the first Union warships arrived at it's wharves on April 27. The reason this impression needs clarification is because of it's importance to Usticesi descendants. Ustica soldiers were part of the European Brigade of foreigners who acted as military police( militiamen) from it's formation in November 1861 until it's disbandment in May 1862. Their primary role was to enforce civil order alongside the city's civilian police force. The Brigade saw it's most value in keeping order in New Orleans once word reached the city on April 24 that Union warships had that night bypassed the Confederate forts at the mouth of the Mississippi and were heading upriver to the city. From April 24 until the city was formally surrended on May 1, the Brigade did it's best to prevent the looting of homes and warehouses that were abandoned as the Confederate Army was ordered out of the city as the army was no match against warships that could bombard the city and/or flood it by breaking it's levees. That the Brigade was able to keep New Orleans from descending into chaos during that critical week should be a matter of pride to all the Ustica members of the Brigade's Italian Guards Battalion and their descendants.


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