Letters received by the Commission Branch of the Adjutant General's Office, 1863-1870

Poznámky

"The Commission Branch was established in the Office of the Adjutant General in January 1863 to handle the correspondence and other paperwork concerning Regular Army officers, Volunteer officers in the staff corps appointed by the President, hospital stewards, ordnance sergeants, and post and regimental sutlers. After the establishment of national cemeteries in February 1867, the Commission Branch also was in charge of matters relating to cemetery superintendents. On January 1, 1871, the Branch was renamed the Appointment, Commission, and Personal Branch (hereafter called ACP). The ACP continued to handle personnel correspondence until July 1894, when such records were filed in the document file of the Adjutant General's Office.".

"The letters and enclosures reproduced in this publication were received from Regular and Volunteer officers, noncommissioned officers, and enlisted men; heads of War Department bureaus; Cabinet members, the President; Congressmen; State, Territorial, and local officials; and private citizens. The correspondence concerns primarily appointments, transfers, assignments, duties, examinations, promotions, discharges, courts-martial, resignations, and pay of individual officers, hospital stewards, ordnance sergeants, post and regimental sutlers, and superintendents of military cemeteries; it also concern applicants for all of these positions. There also are a number of files that do not concern individuals. Among these are letters, orders, and opinions establishing policies and precedents affecting military personnel; communications from staff officers and from company and post commanders requesting personnel; letters from regimental and company commanders reporting on the service of their units during the Civil War or during engagements with Indians; and memorandums transmitting the names of newspapers in which the War Department was authorized to place advertisements. A few letters that concern primarily military operations or other subjects unrelated to personnel matters were also filed in the ACP.".

"According to the recordkeeping practice of the time, letters received were entered in registers alphabetically either by initial letter of surname or office of the writer or of the person whom the letter concerned and thereunder by date of receipt. The letters are arranged to correspond with entries in the registers and are numbered in a separate numerical sequence for each letter of the alphabet for each year. The entries in the registers are not strictly chronological because the letters were entered according to date received rather than date written. There often was a considerable lapse of time between the date the letter was written and the date it was recieved.".

"Letters received were endorsed on the back or on a separate cover sheet with the writer's name and title or the name of the person whom the letter concerned, the date and place the letter was written and a summary of its content, the date the letter was received in the Commission Branch, and the file number assigned to the letter in the register. The Commission Branch file designations consist of the initial letter of the surname of the writer or the person who is the subject of the letter, the file number, the letters "CB" for Commission Branch, and the year the letter was received; e.g., G 251 CB 1866.".

"Commission Branch clerks sometimes consolidated all the AGO documents relating to an individual under one file number. Preceding most of the consolidations is a memorandum that lists the file citations of all the documents included. At the bottom of these memorandums are references to other Commission Branch or ACP files concerning the same individual, which generally are not in the consolidations, either because they were forwarded to another office or because they concerned more than one person. Much of the information on the memorandums is duplicated at the back or on the cover sheet of the document under which the records are consolidated. A consolidation may contain correspondence dated as early as the 1820's or as late as the 1930's.".

Microfilm of original records in The National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Témata

Témata týkající se místa

Poznámky k mikrofilmu/snímkům