Midland County Civil War Graves: Where Veterans Are Buried and How to Find One

Midland County’s Civil War service, in brief

Midland County wasn’t even a functioning county government when the American Civil War broke out. Its borders were drawn in 1831, and the legislature passed a law to organize it in 1850, but nothing actually happened until 1855, when the first county election finally took place. That’s a young county, still mostly forest and river townships, sending its young men off to fight six years later.

Company B of the 10th Michigan Infantry — organized at Flint and mustered in February 6, 1862 — drew heavily from Midland and Saginaw County men, per the regimental roster held at FamilySearch. Men from Midland also fought scattered across other Michigan infantry, cavalry, and artillery regiments; the 23rd Michigan Infantry held a survivors’ reunion at Midland County in 1888, a sign the regiment had a real concentration of veterans still living locally decades later. Statewide, close to 90,000 Michigan troops served, and more than 14,000 died — mostly from disease, not combat — a ratio that shows up again in the burial dates on local headstones, where death often came in a camp or hospital far from home, sometimes years before the war ended.

By the 1880s, Midland County had two Grand Army of the Republic posts: Dwight May Post No. 69 in Midland, chartered June 29, 1882, and Anson Sanford Post No. 44 in Sanford, organized September 24, 1889, and disbanded in 1914. GAR members treated it as a duty, not a county obligation, to find and mark comrades’ graves, starting a records trail genealogists still use. Every Memorial Day they marched out to plant flags and honor their fallen; Sons of Union Veterans camps and their graves registration officers keep that tradition alive, dedicating a new marker whenever an unidentified soldier’s grave is finally confirmed.

Where Midland County’s Civil War veterans are buried and memorialized

There isn’t one consolidated “veterans’ cemetery” in Midland County. The final resting places and gravesites of these Civil War soldiers are spread across township burial sites that date to the mid-1800s, plus the county seat’s municipal cemetery, which holds the largest concentration.

Find a Grave currently lists about three dozen cemetery locations across the county, from small church burial grounds to township cemeteries. If a name isn’t turning up in Midland Cemetery, check the surrounding townships before assuming the record doesn’t exist — I’ve had a “missing” veteran turn up two townships over more than once. Michigan soldiers who came home to farm here often chose to bury their dead close to home, which is one reason so many veterans ended up buried in Michigan farmland cemeteries rather than in the county seat.

How to find a specific soldier’s grave

Finding one Michigan Civil War soldier’s gravesite among a county’s worth of scattered township cemeteries takes a specific order of operations. This is roughly the sequence I use, from easiest to hardest:

1. Search Find a Grave for the county, not just a name. Browse the Midland County cemetery list directly rather than relying on a name search alone — transcriptions vary in spelling, browsing by cemetery catches entries a name search misses, and once you find the memorial page you can leave a virtual flower.
2. Cross-check BillionGraves. It’s a separate, GPS-tagged, crowdsourced photo database, built independently of Find a Grave, so a stone missing from one often turns up on the other.
3. Search the Sons of Union Veterans’ Department of Michigan graves registration database. This project traces back to the 1880s, when GAR posts reported Memorial Day decoration sites, and now holds more than 60,000 burial records statewide, including many never photographed for a cemetery website. If a grave still isn’t marked, the local SUVCW camp’s graves registration officer is the contact for getting a headstone dedicated.
4. Check FamilySearch’s Michigan grave registration collections. Two indexes are worth searching: the Civil War Centennial Observance Commission’s grave registration burial records (index cards, originals at the Archives of Michigan in Lansing) and the older GAR cemetery index, which focuses on soldiers’ home burials.
5. Pull the soldier’s Michigan service record through Michiganology, the Archives of Michigan’s digital platform. Descriptive rolls and muster records here will confirm a regiment and company, which you need before a headstone abbreviation makes any sense.
6. Order the compiled service record and pension file from the National Archives. A Compiled Military Service Record (CMSR) documents enlistment and discharge; a pension file, requested separately, is usually far more detailed and can include a widow’s affidavit, physical description, or residence history. Neither is free or fast — NARA still processes most Union pension files as paper requests, not instant downloads.

If none of that turns anything up, don’t assume the family story is wrong. Unmarked graves were common for veterans who died decades later with no family left to pay for a stone, and some township burial grounds lost their records to fire or simple neglect.

How to read a Civil War veteran’s headstone

Once you’ve located a stone, the shorthand carved into it usually follows a pattern: rank, company letter, regiment number, state, and branch — something like “SGT CO A 9 MICH INF” or “27 MICH INF.” A rank like SGT (sergeant) or CPL (corporal) may appear first, followed by INF for infantry, CAV for cavalry, or ART, HA, and LA for artillery. That string tells you the unit, not the date he died, which is usually cut separately.

A bronze, five-pointed star set into or beside the stone marks a GAR-decorated grave. Each point of the star originally carried a symbol tied to a branch of service — musket, cannon, bugle, anchor, crossed sabers — and the center sometimes stamps a post number, which is your clue to which local GAR post did the marking. In Midland County, that’s most likely Dwight May Post No. 69 or Anson Sanford Post No. 44.

One caution, learned the hard way: a headstone inscription is not a service record. Stonecutters worked from what a family told them, sometimes decades later, and regiment numbers and death dates on stones don’t always match the paper trail — I’ve chased down a “wrong” regiment number more than once before the pension file straightened it out. Treat the stone as a lead, then confirm the unit and dates against a service record before building a family tree entry around it.

Where to go in Midland County itself

The Midland County Clerk’s office (220 W. Ellsworth Street, Midland) handles birth, death, and marriage records for the county and is the starting point if you need a certified death record to go with a burial you’ve located.

The Midland County Historical Society maintains an archive with local family history material and cemetery files, and research staff who can point you toward township sources never put online — access is by appointment.

The Grace A. Dow Memorial Library in Midland keeps a local history and genealogy room, with Midland newspapers on microfilm — useful for obituaries and coverage of GAR encampments and Memorial Day observances.

Frequently asked questions

When was Midland County, Michigan organized, and does that matter for Civil War research? The county’s boundaries were set in 1831, and the legislature authorized organization in 1850, but no county government actually took office until the first election under an 1855 law. That matters for research because vital records, probate files, and township-level record-keeping only start to look like a functioning county system from the mid-1850s forward — right around the time the Civil War generation was coming of age here.

Is there one central Civil War veterans’ section in Midland Cemetery? No. Midland Cemetery has a designated military section (part of Section F, per the city’s own cemetery rules) reserved for veteran burials with government-issue markers, but Civil War-era GAR markers and Union headstones also turn up in several of the cemetery’s older sections rather than one single block.

How do I get a military headstone or GAR marker replaced or installed for a Civil War ancestor? For a government-issue marble headstone, a living descendant or an interested party can apply to the Department of Veterans Affairs for a memorial headstone using the soldier’s service record as proof. For a bronze GAR star marker, contact the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War’s Department of Michigan graves registration program — local camps handle requests and often hold a short dedication ceremony.

My ancestor’s grave isn’t listed on Find a Grave. Where else should I check? Try BillionGraves for a second, independently photographed set of headstones, then the SUVCW Department of Michigan graves registration database, which draws on GAR post reports going back to the 1880s. If the grave itself is unmarked or the stone is gone, a pension file or compiled service record from NARA can still confirm where a soldier died and was buried, even without a headstone to photograph.

What’s the difference between a compiled service record and a pension file? A compiled military service record documents enlistment, muster, and discharge — essentially the bones of a soldier’s time in uniform. A pension file, filed later by the veteran or his widow, is usually thicker and often includes affidavits, marriage proof, and physical descriptions, because the government wanted evidence before it paid out money for decades.