Background: In 1862, following General Order 99 of the War Department, lists were made for military purposes of able-bodied male citizens between the ages of 18 and 45 years old living in all states of the North. The lists for Will County have been microfilmed by the American Genealogical Lending Library (AGLL), and are available for rental to library members as Film # V124-0020.

These military lists are of great value to the family historian in that they constitute an additional census from a time of rapidly changing populations. Also, they often provide valuable information concerning possible military service during the Civil War, which is important in providing leads to the extremely useful and informative Civil War Veteran's Pension Records.

In the summary given below, the Able-bodied Male Citizens of Crete and Washington Townships in Will County, Illinois have been combined and alphabetized. The reason for combining the names for the two townships is because in many cases members of the same family lived in both adjoining townships. The spellings of the names are given in most cases as in the original lists, even in places where we suspect the presence of mispellings probably because the ennumerator and a foreign born informant did not speak the same languages.

Together with the lists of names which are summarized below, the microfilmed records also contain name-only lists of persons in the towns of Crete and Washington (now Beecher) who were subject to military service as Second Class Reserves. Many of the same names are found in both lists. However, possibly because of the lists being gathered at different times, there are a number of names which are unique to each list.

Transcribed and Edited by Edwin Friedrich and Karen Rowe - 1997.