During the Civil War personal identification of soldiers killed and severely wounded in combat was daunting, because of inadequate record keeping in both the Union and the Confederate armies.
An early attempt to ID them was called “name discs” or “soldier pins,” but these met with limited success. Many of those killed in the Civil War were simply marked unknown. [Read more…] about To Identify The Dead: World War Two Student ‘Dog Tags’
The three water color portraits shown here are hanging in Gracie Mansion,