Michigan Civil War Interments: Using the Roll of Honor to Find a Soldier’s Grave

Twenty-seven volumes, one federal burial register

The Roll of Honor is the federal government’s own burial register for the Union dead — twenty-seven volumes, published by the U.S. Army Quartermaster’s Department between 1865 and 1871, listing more than 300,000 soldiers by name, rank, regiment and company, date of death, and the specific cemetery and grave number where each man was laid to rest. Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs, who ran the department for twenty-one years, ordered officers who had overseen wartime and postwar interments to report every burial they’d made or knew about. Those reports, filed cemetery by cemetery, became the Roll of Honor — the closest thing the era produced to a government-verified grave index, imperfect but built from primary paperwork rather than secondhand memory.

Each volume covers a cluster of cemeteries, not a state — the detail that trips people up first. Volume I covers Washington, D.C. and Arlington; Volume III covers the reinterments at Andersonville; other volumes bundle together several states and territories processed around the same time. The full title changes slightly between volumes but always runs some version of “Names of Soldiers Who Died in Defense of the American Union, Interred in the National Cemeteries.”

Where Michigan fits in the Roll of Honor

Michigan appears in Roll of Honor Volume VIII, which groups together burials in Arkansas, California, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, and Nevada, plus several western territories. Within that volume, Michigan’s entries split by cemetery — Detroit and Jackson — each broken out separately by white and Black soldiers, per the record-keeping conventions of the period. It’s a short section relative to the state’s overall contribution — Michigan sent close to 90,000 men into Union service — and that gap is the single most important thing to understand before searching for a specific soldier.

The Roll of Honor was never meant to be a complete list of every Michigan man who died in the war. It’s a list of soldiers the Quartermaster’s Department itself buried or reburied in a national or other federally administered cemetery, and those cemeteries cluster overwhelmingly around Southern battlefields, hospitals, and prisoner-of-war camps — Andersonville, Chattanooga, Corinth, and the cemeteries around Washington and Virginia. A Michigan private who died of typhoid in a Nashville field hospital and was buried in the national cemetery there is a strong candidate for inclusion. A veteran who survived the war and is buried decades later in his own township cemetery is not in this record at all.

Reading the entries correctly

A Roll of Honor page is organized alphabetically within each cemetery section, and the columns are consistent across volumes: name, rank, company and regiment, date of death, and a grave or plot number. Later volumes in the series added a column noting the soldier’s original place of burial before any reinterment, which matters because a body moved from a hasty battlefield grave to a permanent national cemetery sometimes shows two different burial locations across two different sources.

A few things worth knowing before you rely on any single entry:

• Spelling is inconsistent. Names were transcribed from muster rolls, hospital records, and battlefield reports by clerks working fast under difficult conditions — check phonetic variants of a surname before concluding a man isn’t listed.
• “Unknown” is common. A meaningful share of Civil War dead, especially from the earliest and bloodiest battles, were buried as unidentified. Absence of a name doesn’t rule out a soldier being among the unknown dead at a given cemetery.
• The 1994-95 reprint added an index. The original 27 volumes had no master alphabetical index across the whole series; a private publisher’s 1994 reprint (condensed into nine bound volumes) came with a consolidated name index the following year, which is by far the fastest way to find which volume and page to check for a specific surname.

How to search for a Michigan soldier’s interment record

1. Confirm the soldier died in service, not after the war. The Roll of Honor only covers wartime and immediate postwar burials handled by the Quartermaster’s Department — check a compiled service record or pension index first if you’re not certain when or how a soldier died.
2. Use the 1994-95 consolidated index if you can find a copy, through a library or historical society, to identify the volume and page before searching the original scans.
3. Search the Internet Archive or HathiTrust directly for the digitized 1865-1871 volumes if the index isn’t available — Volume VIII is the one to start with for Michigan burials.
4. Check both the white and Black soldier listings for the relevant cemetery. Detroit and Jackson entries in Volume VIII are broken out this way, following the era’s segregated record-keeping practice, and it’s easy to miss an entry by only checking one list.
5. If the soldier isn’t in the Roll of Honor, move to a broader Michigan Civil War search. Compiled service records, pension files, GAR post rosters, and Find a Grave all cover ground this federal register doesn’t — our Michigan Civil War records guide walks through each of those record types and how they fit together.

What to do if your soldier isn’t in the Roll of Honor

Most Michigan Civil War veterans won’t be in this particular record, and that’s expected, not a dead end. If a soldier survived the war, his burial is a local matter, not a federal one — start with Find a Grave and BillionGraves for the county where he eventually settled, and check whether his local Grand Army of the Republic post left burial or decoration records. For a soldier who died during the war but doesn’t turn up in Volume VIII, widen the search to his compiled service record, which will usually state where and when he died even if his grave was never processed into a national cemetery roll. Our county-level guide to Midland County’s Civil War graves is a useful model for what that local-cemetery research looks like in practice, for one Michigan county’s worth of Union veterans.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Roll of Honor for the Civil War? It’s a 27-volume federal publication, produced by the U.S. Army Quartermaster’s Department between 1865 and 1871, recording the names, rank, regiment, and grave location of more than 300,000 Union soldiers buried in national and other cemeteries after the Civil War.

Are Michigan soldiers included in the Roll of Honor? Yes. Roll of Honor Volume VIII, covering Arkansas, California, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, and Nevada among other places, lists Union burials at Detroit and Jackson, Michigan — a smaller share than the state’s overall 90,000-man contribution might suggest, since most Michigan men who died in service were buried near where they fell.

Why don’t most Michigan Civil War soldiers appear in the Roll of Honor? Because it only covers burials the Quartermaster’s Department itself made or reburied in a national or other government-run cemetery, mostly clustered around Southern battlefields, hospitals, and prisoner-of-war camps. A soldier who came home and is buried in his township cemetery decades later is not in this record.

Where can I read the Roll of Honor for free? The Internet Archive and HathiTrust both host scanned copies of the original 1865-1871 volumes, and a privately published 1994-95 index consolidated all the names into one alphabetical reference.

What’s the difference between the Roll of Honor and a Civil War pension file? The Roll of Honor is a burial register — name, unit, and grave location, nothing more. A pension file, requested from the National Archives, documents a soldier’s entire service and disability history and often runs to dozens of pages.