You are welcome. I enjoyed putting that together for you, and I hope that it will help your continued search for truth about what happened to those men.

Many of the southern recruits disappeared and their families never heard from them again. As recruits, those men that died before they could be installed into organized units left little or no record. Some families were fortunate to get a letter later from the surviving companions or have one of the comrades visit them after the war to let them know what happened. I have heard of instances when rural families would hear that a Union patrol chased some Rebels through their neighborhood, and later find some poor man's body in the woods or lying in the prairie grass with no identification on his body to know who to contact. In fact, many of the southerners traveling to join the Confederate forces in Arkansas deliberately avoided carrying papers that could make trouble for their family from the Union provost marshal's office if they were captured. After a few years these isolated graves would be forgotten.

A family member away in Confederate service could not send a letter through the US Postal Service, as he was considered an enemy combatant. Missouri had a lively secret Rebel mail service operated by both men and women primarily to transport mail between southern soldiers and their friends and family back home, back and forth. When Union patrols captured one of these illegal mail carriers, they sometimes published one or two of the letters in newspapers to make fun of the secessionists and their sentimenal letters to loved ones. Very sad.

It's tragic when a country fights against itself.

Bruce