The Santa Ana Historical Preservation
Society is proud to support the amazing work of several gentlemen who are
working to preserve and celebrate the memories of the Civil War veterans
who came to Orange County in order to create a better life for themselves
and their families after the American Civil War. These vets and
their families often played important roles in the early birth and growth
of Orange County during the late 1800s. If you'd like to know more about
this topic, we encourage you to follow the links and get involved with the
Civil War Round Table of Orange County, visit the websites we've listed,
or read Gordon Bricken's book, The Civil War Legacy
in Santa Ana,
-- Guy Ball, SAHPS Board Member and Project
Leader
While studying for my land surveyor’s exam in
2004, I came up with an idea to combine my
land surveying experience with a current project I was involved in
locating Civil War Veteran
graves of Orange County, California.
First, here is some background information about this graves project. In
1999 the Civil War
Round Table of Orange County spearheaded by Paul Gillette (also with Sons
of Union Veterans
of the Civil War “SUVCW”) documented approximately 725 Civil War Veteran
graves in nine
local cemeteries. Those cemeteries are: Anaheim Cemetery; El Toro Memorial
Park; Fairhaven
Memorial Park & Mortuary; Good Shepherd Cemetery; Loma Vista Memorial
Park; Magnolia
Memorial Park; Old Mission Cemetery; Santa Ana Cemetery and Westminster
Memorial Park.
Another earlier contributor to this project is Gordon Bricken, the former
Mayor of the City of
Santa Ana and a member Sons of Confederate Veterans Captain James Iredell
Waddell Camp
#1770 assumed the responsibility of maintaining the graves database after
completion by the
Civil War Round Table of Orange County. My project documents these
findings.
I became a participant in this project in 1999 by researching the old
local newspapers on
microfilm at the Santa Ana Public Library during my lunch hour to find
additional names and I
helped locate some of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) Post records
for the four GAR
Posts that existed in Orange County. Glen Roosevelt (SUVCW) was another
participant who
helped greatly in locating these GAR records in Orange and Los Angeles
Counties and in the
State of Arizona. With the newspaper articles, partial GAR records, we
were able to add
additional names to the list as not every grave stone is identified as
showing they were a Civil
War Veteran.
The goal for my project was to photograph and determine the latitude and
longitude coordinates
on every grave and plot the graves on aerial photographs. As the project
was coming to an end, I
realized that this project will also help preserve the grave stones that
are aging with time and are
becoming very difficult to read.
Continue reading this Introduction by opening the full version.
Charles has created 9 Google Earth files that you can just pull into
Google Earth (a free program at
earth.google.com)
and each file will plot out all of the grave locations for that cemetery.
The GAR veterans are in blue and the CSA veterans in gray. To use these,
download the file and pull them into Google Earth after the program is
running.
