NPR has a great story about identifying a previously-unidentified enlisted man in a Civil War uniform. Tom Liljenquist and his family have collected 1,000 of these such photographs and donated them to the Library of Congress. But the photographs don't feature generals and other high-ranking officers. Instead, they're images of the enlisted men who fought for the Union and the Confederacy during the war. And only a handful of the soldiers have been identified.
Mike McAfee at the West Point Museum, part of the U.S. Military Academy, looked at one picture and immediately knew the regiment. A bit more detective work by others and the mystery soldier from the 14th Brooklyn was identified as Thomas A. Ardies.
The techniques used here can be used to identify people in many other photographs, military or not. You can read this interesting story by Ramona Martinez at http://goo.gl/TpV93.
My thanks to Margaret Eves for telling me about this story.
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