Buttons off the same uniform?

[fishstick]

Howdy all, just curious how many have been able to say with certainty that they found almost all the buttons off of the same uniform on one site? I don't believe I've ever seen any on here or all the youtube vids I've watched. Does it ever happen?

 

[fishstick]

Really no thgts on this?

 

[plehbah2]

It's hard to say for sure if a collection of found buttons are all from the same uniform coat, unless they are found on fragments of a jacket and in a tight group. You might find some buttons in a very defined area, but that could be because a coat was lost or discarded, or they might have been lost in a pattern around a long gone fox hole or around an old well in the yard of a Civil War era cabin. Let's say you are dealing with a standard five button frock coat, it is also possible that the coat was missing a button , or had a button lost and replaced with a slightly different button with a different backmark, so that when you find them there are slight differences even though they would be from the same coat.

When I was a kid I used to obsessively hunt a Civil War- Indian Wars period fort site. There were a few occasions where I found general service eagle buttons numbering four or five in total and in a small area measuring maybe no more than a couple of feet or a few feet in diameter. On those occasions there would be four or five, which would correlate to a common issue coat. I personally felt that there was a good chance that these finds represented lost or discarded coats, but really there is no way to be certain. It remains at most a possibility, and that conclusion has to be good enough.

 

[fishstick]

That's a great write up on this. Now what if by chance you were searching just an old homesite and found them in a group? Would the chances be better then, especially if if was just the one homesite being there, lone home in a field?

 

[unclemac]

i've always assumed some of those buttons and belt buckles were from burials.

 

[fishstick]

i've always assumed some of those buttons and belt buckles were from burials.

Now are talking more like CW campsites or battle site? Never really thgt about just plain homesites

 

[plehbah2]

That's a great write up on this. Now what if by chance you were searching just an old homesite and found them in a group? Would the chances be better then, especially if if was just the one homesite being there, lone home in a field?

I would think that finding a group of buttons around an isolated home site with no wartime activity would certainly make a discarded coat one of the more plausible hypotheses. It's hard to dream up another scenario with those same circumstances in which lots of individual buttons would be lost in one place.

 

[fishstick]

That's my thinking as well. If you would please look at the MY BEST FINDS forum in just a bit and give me your thgts.

 

[bestbuybruce]

Years back I found all the buttons of a coat, General service, Coat and Cuff. Laid out in a pattern of a coat.

 

[fishstick]

Years back I found all the button of a coat, General service, Coat and Cuff. Laid out in a pattern of a coat.

That would DEF be a strange find