Dodge County Civil War Soldiers Database

Dodge County Civil War Veterans

About This Database

This searchable roster brings together nearly 5,000 Civil War service records for men connected to Dodge County, Wisconsin — men who left their farms, shops, and townships between 1861 and 1865 to serve in the Union Army, many of them never returning home. The records are drawn from the official Roster of Wisconsin Volunteers, War of the Rebellion, Volumes I and II, compiled by the Wisconsin Adjutant General’s Office and published in the years following the war. Each entry reflects a soldier’s township of residence, rank, regiment, company, dates of service, and the terse but often telling remarks recorded by 19th-century clerks — wounded, discharged, deserted, died of disease, mustered out, taken prisoner.

Many of these men saw far more than a single muster and discharge — the remarks columns tell a harder story. Soldiers of the 10th Wisconsin Infantry appear repeatedly among the wounded and captured at the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863, one of the war’s bloodiest two days and a defining disaster-turned-stand for the Army of the Cumberland. Others, serving with regiments like the 16th Wisconsin, marched with Sherman through the brutal summer of 1864, appearing in these records as wounded or killed at Kenesaw Mountain, Corinth, and finally Atlanta itself — the campaign that broke the Confederacy’s hold on the Deep South and helped secure Lincoln’s re-election that fall. Entries here also trace men through Shiloh and the fighting around Nashville, part of the grinding Western Theater campaigns that rarely get the attention of Gettysburg or Antietam in popular memory, but cost just as many Dodge County families their sons, husbands, and fathers.

No record this size, transcribed from handwritten and typeset sources more than a century old, is without its flaws. Spelling of names varies from entry to entry — a man might appear as “Hanf” in one township’s muster and “Hauf” in another — and township boundaries and names have shifted since the 1860s in ways that don’t always map cleanly onto the Dodge County of today. Where the same man is confidently identified serving multiple stints in a single regiment, those entries have been consolidated into one continuous record; where the evidence is ambiguous, entries are left separate rather than guessed at. If you find an error, a missing soldier, or a family connection worth adding, I’d genuinely like to hear about it — this is a living document, not a finished one.

I’m making this database freely searchable because this kind of record shouldn’t sit locked in a bound volume in a library archive — it belongs to the historians, genealogists, and descendants who are still, more than 160 years later, trying to trace where their family came from and what they gave. If you’re researching a Dodge County ancestor, I hope this saves you an afternoon of squinting at microfilm. For more on how the war reached into one Dodge County town specifically, see my article on Horicon in the Civil War — because the past only happens once.

-Carl Reinemann