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United States Civil War Nurses

Memorial to Civil War Nurses Massachusetts State Building, Boston Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel

This page is part of the Trilogy Part One: United States Civil War Nurses Project Table I: to identify more nurses, fill in the blanks and contain enough nurses' data to create WikiTree profiles. These nurses helped heal soldiers from battle wounds and disease in the Civil War era for any timeframe from 12 April 1861 through 9 May 1865.

Civil War Nurses Project Page Links

For convenience, this table links all the project pages.

Page Purpose & Goal

The purpose of this page is to:

• Meet & Greet Civil War Nurses - a brief history of who they were, what they did, and their historical impact.
• Link research resources;
• Table I: list of nurses identified with resources and hints to generate WikiTree profiles of the Civil War Nurses listed in the tables;
• Identify and add additional nurses, fill in the blanks and create profiles.

Once an identified nurse has a WikiTree profile, the nurse and information transfers to the Civil War Nurses Profiles page.

How to Help

• If you find a website, article, FamilySearch profile, or a FindAGrave memorial of a person on this table, or you find another nurse not in these lists, please leave a comment on this page with the name and links so we can add his/her information or as another identified nurse.
• Research and indentify additional nurses not on the tables below or on Table II.
• Join Us and help identify more nurses! Here's how: Help Needed!

Civil War Nurses: A Brief History

Mother Bickerdyke

Introduced here, Civil War Nurses provided an unprecedented role in the United States War between the States. While a few men served in this role, women were only allowed to serve as nurses when they volunteered to help the cause on either side, Union or Confederate. The Civil War was the bloodiest with the most casualties in the United States war history.

Before the Civil War, women nurses didn't exist. Estimates range that approximately 2,000 - 6,000 women, North and South, served as volunteer nurses in military hospitals and on the battlefields during the American Civil War. Many nursing practices still used today were created during the Civil War.

Bloodshed. Gore. Blood curdling screams. Chaos. Dirt. All of these are reasons why men thought it would be inappropriate to have women nurses on the battlefield during the Civil War. Surely they were too weak and innocent for the harsh realities of war. And, gasp! The nakedness of wounded soldiers certainly was not befitting for a woman to see. The war would surely corrupt women and turn them into vulgar beings if allowed to volunteer as nurses in such proximity the horrors of war. They experienced at first hand the grim constants of war -- amputated limbs, mutilated bodies, disease and death -- and provided invaluable aid to the sick and wounded soldiers and medical authorities on either side.

The opposition for women as nurses died down. They became not only accepted by the soldiers, but embraced by them. Nurses came to be known as "Angels on the Battlefield." They not only helped administer medicines and change bandages, but they were there to provide comfort to soldiers' suffering. The men faced unspeakable horrors in war, and they continued to see pain and suffering all around them in hospitals, but the kind face and motherly touch of a woman could brighten their day and lessen their pain from some of the hardships of war.

"You have given your boys to die for their country; now you can give your girls to nurse them." (Nurse Mary Stinebaugh to her father in 1863.)

Women also performed domestic duties on top of their medical ones. They were in charge of keeping the hospitals clean, changing linens, airing out the patients' mattresses, cooking, and scouring the floors, among other duties. It was a hard job, but many women volunteered to help because they felt it was their duty to help out their country to win the war. The alternative for many was to sit at home doing nothing as their sons and husbands were off in battle. This was a way for women to feel that they were also contributing to the war effort in a more direct way.

Of those so employed a relative few, such as Louisa May Alcott, Jane Stuart Woolsey, and Katharine Prescott Wormeley - recorded their experiences for posterity. Most, however, unfortunately left little record of their wartime service. They therefore remain in large measure historically anonymous, except for the sporadic appearance of their names on hospital muster rolls. Consequently, the activities and influence of the woman nurse constitute one of the rare aspects of Civil War history that has not been extensively recorded, and little known until now.

All these women serving for the first time in a new profession need to be remembered for the vital service they performed in what is now one of the most respected and necessary professions in the medical industry, and created the military nurse as a field of service in subsequent wars.

• Note: mentioned in the Introduction and after further research, there were professional nurses in the Unites States, many trained in Europe and immigrated in groups, who established and ran hospitals before the Civil War. These 6-750 sisters in 26 - 29 Orders were called to serve, the first paid military nurses. As a special subgroup of nurses in the Civil War, we will add their history here, and plan to respectfully identify the orders and sisters as the project progresses.

Research Resources

See Civil War Nurses Research & Resources for resources to help identify more nurses and add to the data for the nurses listed below.

Acknowledgment

While giving credit where it is due usually comes at the end, it is important to note how this page and Civil War Nurses: Research and Resources started with a nod and deepest gratitude and thanks to Warren Kuntz who began this research and created a spreadsheet of nurses one cell at a time. His first post in G2G about this page as a resource is here: Create a FSP from a spreadsheet - Civil War Nurses Resource. His desire to bring this under-reported group of women to the WikiTree community is commendable, and his passion to preserve their stories and remember their names is admirable. While Warren has lost his "genealogy mojo" and is taking a break from WikiTree, we continue working towards his goal, and hope to welcome him back soon.

Warren's interest began with passing a bronze statute in Illinois and taking a picture of it: Mother Bickerdyke, and added it to her profile. Curious about who she was, he did a little research and developed a list of 300 nurses, the start of this page.

Warren thanks the Oregon Department, Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War 1862-1865, which compiled some of the data used in the table. Please see their FindAGrave virtual cemetery Angels of the Battlefield,

Table I. Civil War Nurses: Identification

These tables are to identify Civil War Nurses and assemble data found from external websites.

Tables Key

Arranged in individual alphabeticatical tables by Current Last Name, the column headings are defined as:

• Nurse's Name - The following tables are sorted alphabetically by Current Last Name, either the maiden or married name, and link to the profile when created or found in the [[WikiTree ID|Name]] format.
• FamilySearch Profile - the FSFTID is linked to the profile on FamilySearch.org. This is helpful as you can use the WikiTree X extension to create the nurse's profile in WikiTree. WikiTree X works in several other sites. This is a beginning profile and still needs a written narrative and sources, which many are included in the FamilySearch profile.
• FindAGrave Memorial - the Memorial number for the FindAGrave memorial links to the nurse's memorial. The memorial may give some clues for family and dates to research sources, and to add the cemetery category to the profile. (Note: FindAGrave Memorials used in the Sources section of the nurse's profile on WikiTree should be taken from the "View Source" citation listed in the memorial, remove the web address from the citation, and add the FindAGrave template in this format replacing the actual Memorial Number: {{FindAGrave|1234567}}. See FindAGrave for more information.
• Wikipedia or Other Article - The name of the website is used and linked to the nurse's article; using the website name takes less space.

• Some have "Wikiwand" in the URL, not Wikipedia. Wikiwand is a proprietary software interface developed for viewing Wikipedia articles available for several popular web browsers as a free browser extension or mobile app; WIkipedia is the actual website where the article is found. If you get an error or the article is not found, consider adding the WIkiwand extension to your browser, or change "wikiwand" in the URL address to "wikipedia".
• Wikipedia images in the articles and categories (see Resources above) are public domain pictures and may be added to the nurses' profiles with the proper acknowledgement and link to the image.
• The nurse's article may be used as a secondary source and to help with the biography narrative (be sure to paraphrase and not copy directly).

• Personal & Service Information - contains notes and other data to use as clues to find sources, service regiment, family, residences, and other genealogy facts for the biography.

Civil War Nurses Current Last Name A - D

"A"

"B"

"C"

"D"

Civil War Nurses Current Last Name E - J

"E"

"F"

"G"

"H"

"I"

"J"

Civil War Nurses Current Last Name K - R

"K"

"L"

"M"

"N"

"O"

"P"

"Q"

"R"

Civil War Nurses Current Last Name S - Z

"S"

"T"

"U"

"V"

"W"

"Y"