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Notes & Queries EDITED BY BOYD B. STUTLER 517 Main Street Charleston, West Virginia this department is designed as an open forum for researchers and readers of CtvtZ War History for questions on and discussions of phases of the Great Conflict and its personnel. Also for newly discovered or unrecorded sidelights of the war. Contributions are invited; address Notes and Queries Editor. QUERIES 27.General Thomas Jordan, CSA: I am at work on a thesis which will cover one year in the life of General Thomas Jordan, who served as Chief of Staff to General Beauregard— the year 1869 to 1870 when he was a leader of the insurgents in Cuba. But I need data relating to his early life and Civil War service to round out the background of this Confederate officer. For a relatively important man in CSA military service, the information needed seems very elusive. Query: Can anyone tell me the present whereabouts of General Jordan's papers, if they exist, or furnish copies of letters or documents which may be helpful in my study? Also, I would like to have the names of his children or grand-children; it may be possible to track down the papers through some of his descendents. Cornelius H. BuU III 28.Loyalty Oaths for Virginia Unionists: The Convention which assembled at Wheeling, West Virginia, on June 11, 1861, for the purpose of organizing and restoring a loyal Union government of Virginia (a secession within a secession), adopted an ordinance on June 19 providing for an oath of loyalty to the United States, 135 136BOYD B. stutler "anything in the Constitution and laws of the State of Virginia, or the ordinances of the Convention which assembled at Richmond on the 13th day of February, 1861, to the contrary notwithstanding." The form of oath prescribed bound the subscriber to "uphold and defend the government of Virginia as vindicated and restored by the Convention which assembled at Wheeling on the 11th day of June, 1861." Later, an act of the Legislature of the Restored Government passed February 10, 1862, defined the classes required to take the oath, and also provided for the issuance of printed forms and for registers to be kept by the county clerks. Query: How widely was this act observed, and what records, individual forms and registers, have been preserved in county offices and private collections? DeIf Norona 29. James A. Seddon, Confederate War Secretary: I am endeavoring to locate material on James Alexander Seddon, gifted Virginia lawyer and politician, who was Secretary of War for the Confederate States from November 22, 1862, to February 5, 1865. The data is being assembled for a biography which I expect to write as a doctoral dissertation under the direction of Dr. Fletcher Green at the University of North Carolina. When completed it will be the first full-scale study of the Secretary and the Confederate War Department and will, it is hoped, be a standard and definitive work on a little known aspect of Confederate history. Particularly helpful will be diaries which mention Seddon, correspondence between individuals and the CS War Department, letters to or from John Archibald Campbell or Albert Taylor Bledsoe, Assistant Secretaries, eta Gerard F. O'Brien ANSWERS Query 16. Iowa Cavalry at Pohick Church: Irwin L. Stein, History Department, Los Angeles Public Library, does not have a complete answer to the query posed by Colonel Henry S. Merrick (March, 195T), but does present an interesting theory. Mr. Stein writes: "There doesn't seem to be any record of Iowa Cavalry assigned anywhere in the East, but I wonder if the following suggestion is too outrageously fanciful? During the time when the 22nd Army Corps constituted the District and Department of Washington, some 14 or more regiments of the Veterans Reserve Corps served in it. Could it be that the Iowa cavalrymen now belonged to the Veterans Reserve Corps? Men from the same area might naturally stick together, and nostalgia would account for their following their names with their old regimental designations rather than the new ones in the VRC." Notes ir Queries137 Query 19. 2nd and 3rd Texas Infantry Regiments: A number of readers responded to the query of...