We’re often asked whether a soldier’s Civil War records will include information about his parents. The answer is maybe! There are a variety of contexts in which his parents might be found in his records. Here are a few examples:
Compiled Military Service Records (CMSRs) for Confederate soldiers are online, but many of the images are so faint that they are unreadable. In other cases, some pages seem to be missing from those online records. In either case, there is a solution that is not well known. All surviving Confederate CMSRs were digitized by Fold3
A researcher asked, “Why did some soldiers have aliases?” There is a long list of possible answers.
Yes, we’re in business to copy records from the National Archives (“NARA”) but we encourage you to go to there yourself instead if that is practical. There’s nothing like getting your own hands on your ancestors’ original documents!
Getting the Full Pension File: Once you have found a record of a pension in an index, the next step is to get access to the full pension file. The pension file may be in one of several possible places, however, and you’ll need to know where and how to access it.
Cases Studies: Here we offer some real examples to demonstrate some of the problematic issues having to do with pension indexes and how to get around them.
Alternative Pension Indexes: When the principal pension indexes don’t include what you want, there are some alternatives. In fact, those alternative indexes sometimes include information about the veteran that is not recorded on any other pension index.
Principal Pension Indexes: To find a Civil War pension, you must first find it in an index. There are several types of indexes available online and they contain different – and sometimes conflicting – kinds of data. It is therefore critical that you understand the differences and consult the correct index(es), depending on your purpose.
Eligibility: The qualifications to receive a pension changed over time. Some reasonable conclusions can be drawn merely by examining the date of the application and the laws that were in place at that time.
Terminology and Abbreviations: In Part 2 of this series, we will define the terms and abbreviations that are found in Civil War pension files.