As part of our Kentucky U.S. Colored Troops Project we are researching the lives of African American men who enlisted in the Union Army in Kentucky. To do this, we are using a variety of archival documents, including slave schedules, church records, wills, estate inventories, pension documents, census data, and newspapers to create a database record for each soldier and his family with links to primary source documents as well as a family tree. The results of this research are published in a searchable database, with new information being added regularly. 

Our eventual goal is to research all 23,700 African American men who enlisted in Kentucky. But our starting point is to focus on approximately 750 soldiers from nine counties in Kentucky that surround Louisville. So far, we are approximately halfway through this first phase of our research.

There are several ways you can explore these soldiers’ records. You can browse by county, you can browse by regiment, you can search for a soldier, or search by an enslaver.

We have also put together a set of instructions that can help in searching through this database, whether you are looking for a certain soldier, someone in a soldier’s family, or people who were enslaved by a certain person or family.