JACKSON (AP) — Before home computers arrived, Grady Howell’s “search engine” was a pay phone and a bunch of nickels.

“I’d take a list of names of Civil War soldiers, drive to whatever community their company came from, and I’d look for their descendants,” said Howell, 64, of Jackson, a Civil War historian and author of 19 books.

“I’d drop in those nickels and call everyone in the book who shared the soldiers’ last names; sometimes I struck gold.”

Sometimes, he struck out; but today, in the midst of the computer age, Howell has been able to save time, heartache and gasoline by mining online databases and digitized documents.

It wasn’t until earlier this month, though, that he and fellow researchers were granted entry to the mother lode: nearly 275,000 newly-published pages put online for the first time by the National Archives.

“It’s a wonderful new world,” Howell said.

The National Archives’ virtual papers went online April 6, six days before the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s official start, and — closer to home — about four months after the University of Mississippi plopped its Civil War archive online. “It’s very generous for the National Archives and Ole Miss to scan these documents,” Howell said.

For those more interested in the genesis, and revelations, of the Civil War, Ole Miss, the University of Southern Mississippi, Mississippi State University and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History are among state institutions offering them an opportunity to eyeball images of letters, diaries, photographs and more from the comfort of their own homes.

“In research universities across the South, there is definitely a push to get more Civil War materials online. It’s not just Ole Miss,” said Jason Kovari, special collections digital initiative librarian.

Ole Miss’ viewable online items number more than 800, and the list is getting longer, Kovari said.

The majority concern the Confederacy, said Jennifer Ford, director of Archives and Special Collections.

Those include a letter written July 3, 1863, by Confederate Sgt. Jeremiah Gage, from Gettysburg, Pa., to Holmes County, Miss.:

“My dear mother This is the last you may ever hear from me. I have time to tell you that I died like a man.

Bear my loss as best you can. Remember that I am true to my country and my greatest regret at dying is that she is not free.

(This letter is stained with my blood.)“

It is among the collection’s “gems,” Kovari said.

Such documents are not necessarily genealogical material, unless you’re related to the writer, Ford said.

“But they do add to the narrative of the war, in the field and at the home front.”

As more documents are digitized on a variety of sites, this swelling access to obscure or far-flung materials will contribute to an understanding of the causes and consequences of the war that broke out on April 12, 1861, at Fort Sumter, S.C.

It is a conflict that has fascinated Howell since July 3, 1955, when, as an 8-year-old boy, he surveyed for the first time the grounds of Vicksburg National Military Park, where a city of monuments to Union soldiers stands.

“I can still smell the fresh-mown grass and see all those trench lines that the Confederate and Union soldiers called ‘ditches,’ “ he said. “I saw the cannon, and I knew that something amazing had happened at that site. It’s the closest thing to a religious experience I’ve ever had.”

In honor of the sesquicentennial of the war that spawned Howell’s obsession, Ancestry.com made the National Archives’ records available for free during a one-week trial period earlier this month, along with access to its own collection of related materials.

Surveying the records now costs $12.95 monthly for a year’s subscription.

Many researchers already subscribe, as do family genealogists like Barnett Taylor, 63, of Jackson.

“To have all those records digitized — what a bonanza,” said Taylor, who has traced his African-American family’s roots back to the 1830s and his wife’s ancestry to 17th-century Jamestown, Va.

Over the years, he has become addicted to the microfilmed records available at a much-used local storehouse of genealogy: the Family History Center, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in Clinton.

“But there are so many records that are cumbersome to get to,” Taylor said. “With this new stuff the Archives is bringing out, we’re getting a whole new realm of study.”

Those documents are among the most frequently scrutinized in the Archives’ Civil War stockpile, containing the names of about 3 million men who enlisted for the draft from 1863 to 1865.

Some 17 million Americans are descended from Civil War combatants, archivists estimate, including many who don’t know it.

More to the point for Taylor: Around 180,000 African Americans served in the Union Army during the war, and many more served in the Union Navy, according to the National Park Service.

“There was probably someone in my family, or my wife’s, who fought in the war,” Taylor said. “I’m still looking.”

Once you start looking, it’s hard to stop, said Peter Miazza, 81, of Madison, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

“But when I started my research about 15 years ago, I didn’t use the Internet. It took me a while to get enough nerve to get on it.”

Today, he is a devoted subscriber to such websites as ancestry.com.

While not all websites offer an extensive collection of digitized records, many have databases that help researchers pinpoint the home of a sought-after fragment of history.

By such means, Miazza has narrowed down the likely location of at least one unmarked grave of a Confederate soldier buried in Jackson’s Greenwood Cemetery.

“No matter which side you were on, these boys gave their lives, the full measure of devotion to their cause,” he said, borrowing a phrase from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

“To think that they are lying in an unmarked grave all these years, it rankles you. The least we can do is mark where they’re buried. It’s something that is owed to them.”