A newly available resource at Ancestry.com makes some useful Civil War records available for easy searching. Thousands of civilian hospital employees appear in U.S., Carded Civil Service Records of Hospital Attendants, Matrons and Nurses, 1861-1865.
This collection has the names of many women who worked as hospital employees for the Union in the North, as well as in Union-held towns in the South. There are also entries for forts on the western frontier. Race is not mentioned on the cards, but cross-checking names with census records shows that some African-American women are included. Several hundred nuns who worked as nurses during the war appear on the index.
Most women were identified as nurses, cooks, or laundresses, while some were working as hospital matrons, with some managerial authority.
By David A. Norris, Internet Genealogy author
