SUMMARY Ladies’ Memorial Associations were locally organized groups of southern white women who, following the American Civil War (1861–1865), tracked down the scattered remains of Confederate soldiers and reinterred them in Confederate cemeteries. Following Robert E. Lee‘s surrender in April 1865, more than 260,000 Confederate war dead were buried throughout the South, a majority of them in Virginia. Most of these soldiers would not be returned home; instead, they eventually would be placed in Confederate cemeteries. But these cities of the dead were not to be furnished by the federal or state governments; neither were they to be organized by Confederate veterans. Instead, the associations created Confederate cemeteries, which served as final resting places for approximately 80 percent of the fallen soldiers.