Series 1200 is a large collection of records of Wisconsin's Civil War regiments. The majority of the records were created by officers and clerks during the war years, with the remainder consisting of records that were created or added by the state Adjutant General's office during the 1880s and 1890s as a result of that agency's work to clarify the service records of soldiers whose records were ambiguous, incorrect, or incomplete.
For the records compiled during the war, Series 1200 contains the copy of the document sent to the State Adjutant General's office in Madison. Duplicate copies were sent to the United States Adjutant General's office in Washington, and in many cases company and regimental commanders kept a copy for their own records. After the war some of these personal copies were turned over to the Adjutant General. (Still other copies were deposited with the Historical Society by individuals -- sometimes with personal papers about their wartime experience -- and these collections of records are currently arranged and described as manuscript collections rather than public records).
At the end of the Civil War, the documents that now comprise Series 1200 were collected in the Wisconsin Adjutant General's Office. There, clerks used them to verify Wisconsin's contribution to the war effort and to compile the information in two sets of muster rolls the “Red Books” (Series 1144, Regimental Muster and Descriptive Rolls), which were prepared in the late 1860s, and the “Blue Books” (Series 1142, Regimental Descriptive Rolls), which were compiled in the mid-1880s. The Series 1200 documents were also utilized in the publication of the Roster of Wisconsin Volunteers, 1886, and index, 1914, and they supported the pension claims of numerous Wisconsin veterans. The records were transferred to the State Archives in 1964.
