The National Archives is providing free access through FOLD3.com to all its digitized Civil War records for the United States Colored Troops through May 31, 2014. See here for details:
http://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2013/nr13-98.html
The military service and pension records are a gold mine of historical, genealogical, social, and community information. You will find birth place and dates, physical descriptions, battles fought, wounds incurred, death dates and burials, parents, wives, children’s names, other relationships (marriage and children’s birth dates too), employment information, former enslavers names, and community information such as midwives names, ministers, neighbors, fellow soldiers names, land and asset ownership, and more.
Fold3 has digitized all the Civil War Service records, and has begun the process of digitizing Widows and Dependents pensions. There are also links to order copies of pension records not digitized from the National Archives. These are expensive, but you can also download the microfilm information and access the records through a personal visit to a National Archives branch near you.
Have fun digging!
Best,
Kate
Kate Clifford Larson, Ph.D. Winchester, MA 01890 781-756-1930 kcliflar@aol.com kate.larson@simmons.edu Check out my new and updated website:www.harriettubmanbiography.com Find Me on Twitter https://twitter.com/KCliffLarson
Author, Bound For the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero. (Ballantine, 2004); The Assassin’s Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln. (Basic Books, 2008); and Rosemary: An Interrupted Life. (Houghton Mifflin, spring 2015)
Consulting Historian, Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway and All American Road. Eastern Shore, Maryland.
Adjunct, Dept. of History
Simmons College,
Boston, MA
The Ties That Bind 
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