This series will explore the many mysteries of the Civil War pension file, including how to find and interpret the many types of online pension indexes, some details of which are rarely documented elsewhere. Those indexes alone may contain hidden clues and a remarkable amount of detail about the veteran’s life, family, and military service.
The fact that your ancestor fought in the Civil War and lived in a southern state does not mean that he was a Confederate soldier. “Southern Loyalists” were citizens of southern states who sympathized with the northern cause to preserve the union. Approximately 150,000 of them (or more) became Union soldiers.
Contrary to popular belief, many Confederate veterans did receive pensions. They were provided not by the U.S. Federal government but by the individual southern states. Although Confederate pension files typically contain fewer documents than Union ones, they are nonetheless very useful for family researchers.
The last widow of a Civil War veteran was not eligible for his pension.
The American Civil War was fought from 1861 to 1865 and the average soldier was 18-45 years old. So if you have a white, male ancestor who was born between roughly 1816 and 1847 and lived in the United States in the early 1860s, then he probably played some part in the Civil War.
While there are some wonderful free web sites (notably FamilySearch.org) from which you can access many online records, Ancestry.com and Fold3.com offer a wide variety of records that are not available anywhere else. In fact, if you go to the National Archives in Washington D.C. to access the original microfilms for those records, you’ll be directed to Ancestry.com and Fold3.com instead. In order to access most of the records at Ancestry.com or Fold3.com from your home computer or laptop, however, you’d need to pay a subscription fee. But there are many ways to access them for FREE.
Following is the complete list of the “Immortal 600,” a group of Confederate officers in captivity who were held as human shields in the line of friendly fire in Charleston Harbor and then subjected to some of the most inhumane treatment of POWs that was ever documented in the Civil War. (This previous post focused specifically
Described as a “identification tag,” this card was issued to each of the 22,103 veterans from Pennsylvania who attended the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1913. (Some other states issued similar ones to its attending veterans). The veteran was asked to carry it in his pocket “in case of sickness or accident.”
The National Park Service maintains the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System (CWSS) which is a database of the men who served in the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War. In the context of a larger project, I wondered how many soldiers served from each state so I did a geographic analysis of
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