Each roll contains the names of the constituent officers and men, frequently citing their dates of enlistment, and documenting their assignments, activities and/or, if relevant, any man’s special conditions or changes since the prior bi-monthly period. For background, the several most common categories of records within this archive might be briefly defined:īi-monthly muster rolls were prepared at the company level in order to track the army’s strength in the finest detail. These, in short, constitute the largest aggregation of the “paperwork” of the army’s units. Being composed of 138 reels of microfilmed contemporary manuscript documents, the title of Record Group M-246 is somewhat of a misnomer in that its contents include bi-monthly muster rolls and payrolls, weekly strength returns, descriptive rosters, periodic inspection reports, clothing returns, as well as a potentially broad array of “miscellaneous” unit-related archival records. Additionally, and much more conveniently, these records are now available online. To complement the website’s indexing of Continental Army orderly books, this section profiles the other most beneficial source for “micro” study of individual army units, that being the collection of unit “rolls” available via microfilm through the National Archives system. Private, 2nd Battalion Philadelphia Associators, 1776
