NOTE.
There are some facts about the rolls of the regiment that demand explanation. The published rolls of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts give the Twenty-ninth a total membership of eighteen hundred and twenty commissioned officers and enlisted men. Of this number, fourteen commissioned officers[59] and three hundred and thirty-four enlisted men were transferred to it from the Thirty-fifth Massachusetts, June 9, 1865. A large proportion of these enlisted men are placed upon the rolls of the Twenty-ninth, without remark or note indicating that they were transferred, and appear upon our rolls as recruits for 1864. As they joined our regiment after the close of the war, and have their record with the Thirty-fifth for all except about a month of their entire service in the army, there seems to be no reason for publishing their names in this volume. The Twenty-ninth is charged with the desertion of some of these men, while in point of fact it derived no benefit from their service.
Besides these men, and those who are placed upon the following company rolls, there are found, as recruits for 1864, the names of about ninety men on the published rolls of the Twenty-ninth. After a careful consideration of all the facts, I have concluded to print the names of seventy of these soldiers, though it is very doubtful whether all of them actually served with the regiment. I print them in a roll by themselves, for the reason that it does not appear with certainty with what companies of the regiment they were connected. Five of these men are reported to have died in the service, and I have placed their names at the end of the roll of our dead.
The names of the following soldiers of the regiment do not appear at all upon the Adjutant-General’s rolls: Thomas Burt, Edwin H. Hosmer, Charles Kleinhans, Edward L. Pettis, of Company E; Leander Clapp, Henry W. Pettee, of Company F; John Usherwood, Charles Young, George S. Welsch, of Company H; Ira A. Clark of Company I; and Martin Bird, Joseph A. Brown, David Dockerty, and William H. Moore, of Company K. The name of Moore does not appear upon any of the rolls of the regiment which I have been able to find.
The reader will observe that I have noted upon the following rolls the death and wounding of certain soldiers. This has been done because their names were omitted from the list of casualties given in the narrative portion of the work.
The published rolls of the regiment give a list of forty-nine “Unassigned Recruits.” There could not have been any unassigned men who actually joined the regiment for duty, and the publication of this list only shows the unsatisfactory condition of the records of both the War Department and of our own State. With the help of kind comrades in each company, I have closely examined this list, and taken from it all identified names, and placed them with the companies to which they belonged; and it may interest the comrades to know that, but for this examination, some of the best soldiers in the regiment would have suffered the mortification of seeing their names printed in a list of “unassigned recruits.” After all the labor bestowed upon this matter, there are still several soldiers in the list referred to whom we have not been able to identify, and the conclusion is they were never members of the regiment.—Author.