One of the original purposes of starting this blog was to share my love of genealogy as well as share my knowledge and things I've picked up along the way.
I've recently been doing a lot of research in military pension and service records at the Archives. My friend Joe* came with me the other day and made the comment "How are regular people supposed to know all of this?"
I'm really lucky in my combination of skills, education, and experience that makes me uniquely qualified to do genealogy research. As Joe pointed out, there are some things I learned in my work at the National Archives that "normal" researchers don't know. They can learn it, there just isn't anyone to tell them from the beginning like there was for me.
So I want to share some of that knowledge :)
First: what is a military pension or service record?
I'll answer the second part of that question first. A Service Record, or, fully, a Compiled Military Service Record (CMSR), is pretty much exactly what the name implies - a compiled record of an individual's service in the military. I'm not as familiar with records post Civil War, so I can't really speak for those. I would guess they would be about the same. But Civil War (and War of 1812, and Indian War, and everything preceding...) CMSRs are a series of cards that indicate an individual's service during the war. The cards will indicate things like the date and place that the individual enlisted, where they were at certain points during their service, how much money they were paid...
CMSRs were created around the turn of the 20th century from gigantic log books that were kept during the war(s) that recorded all of this information. Someone decided that it would be a whole lot easier to find a person in the huge log book (and therefore prove the individual's service, which is part of the requirement for obtaining a pension) if there were cards that indicated this information and then were compiled into one folder. So, it was someone's job (or lots of someones) to go through the log books and make a card every time someone's name appears. And then all of the cards for one person were put into a folder with his name and unit on it.
For the Civil War, all Confederate CMSRs have been digitized and are available on fold3.com. fold3 is own by Ancestry, and is a subscription service. Sometimes, local libraries will have subscriptions to fold3. Family History Centers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints have access to fold3 available for their patrons. Find a Family History Center here. They are working on digitizing the Union service records, so some of them are on fold3 already, some are closed for digitization, and others are only available at the National Archives in Washington, DC.
I'll go onto pensions, then I'll return to CMSRs and show examples of what I'm talking about/what information you can gain from these records.
Pension records are when the individual returned, or didn't return, from the war injured or otherwise with his quality of life changed from what it was before the war. There are four general categories of pensions - invalid, widows, minors, and mother/father pensions. If the individual did return home, but was unable to work or carry on life as it was before the war, he could apply to receive a pension to ease the financial burden a little bit. If the individual didn't return home from the war, his widow, child, or dependent mother or father could apply to receive a pension. Sometimes, if the individual received a pension, but then passed away sometime later, his widow, dependent child, mother, or father could apply to continue to receive the pension. In some cases, the line continued and the dependent child applied after the widow died.
Pensions have the possibility of containing a wealth of information. When the individual applied for a pension, he had to prove service, as well as change in his situation. There are often affidavits from friends and family who knew him both before and after the war, indicating the change in his personality. There are surgeon certificates, from physical examinations from a surgeon indicating health issues. If the individual received the pension, there will be information about how much the pension will be for, as well as any increase or decrease in the rate of the pension. If a dependent applied for a pension, he/she would have to submit proof of relationship, so there is a chance there are things like marriage certificates, birth certificates, etc. (They also have to prove the invalid died, so there may be a death certificate). Every pension is unique, so there is no telling exactly what will be in the file without pulling it. (That's what it's called when you go an request it from the National Archives) There is some information that the index card will indicate and hint at the possible information in the file. I'll cover that in the examples section.
These poor people often had to jump through numerous hoops before they received a pension, so often there is a lot of information and often repeated information from different sources in the record.
Union pension records are located at the National Archives in Washington, DC. Confederate pensions were issued on a state-by-state basis and are located at the state of issuance.
Examples
Here I'll talk about the general information that can be gleaned from a CMSR/pension index card. In a later post, I'll go into more detail about requesting the records at the National Archives and the the information the can/may contain.
CMSR
Here I'll use the example of my very own ancestor's Civil War CMSR. Marion Snyder was my 3x great grandfather on my mother's side. He served in Company E of the 125th Ohio Infantry. But, as I'll show you on the index card, he also served in another unit.
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This is Marion Snyder's CMSR Index card. At the top of the card, you see his name and unit. The spelling of his name at the top of the card is important here. Often, the name could have been misspelled in the log books. Or, it could have been recorded with initials instead of his first or middle name. They recorded it on the card exactly as it was spelled in the log book. After the fact, when they were compiling the cards into a folder, they did their best to indicate if there is a different name spelling of the same individual. The different name spellings would each be in their own folder, but on the index card on the section "see also," a reference to the different name spelling would be indicated. Here's an example where that is the case ->
The index card will also indicate the individual's entering and exiting rank. As I mentioned earlier, Marion's index card says "see also Vet. Res. Corps." This is a reference to the Veteran Reserve Corp, a unit that individuals were often transferred to if they sustained illness or injury during the war that prevented their "normal" service, but that wasn't so severe that they could no longer serve. This reference section means that there is another service record out there for Marion Snyder. Service records were compiled according to unit, not individual. So if a single individual had service in multiple units, there would be a service record for each unit.
Pension
There are a few different pension indexes, so the index cards you find may vary.
Let's take a look at one example to see what we can learn.
As you can see at the top of the card, this is the pension index for Marion Snyder. Let's pretend we didn't learn about his service through the CMSR index card. We will relearn it all through the pension index card.
If Marion's widow or children had applied for his pension after his death, their names would appear in the section right under his name - Name of Dependent - Widow - Minor.
In the section just below that, we see what units Marion served in - F 8 V.R.C. and E 125 Ohio Inf. Let's break that down - the E is referring to the company designator, 125 is the regiment number, Ohio is the state served and the Inf stands for infantry. The "V.R.C." is another reference to the Veteran's Reserve Corps that I talked about above.
If we had previous known the unit that Marion had served in, this is how we could verify that this pension index is referring to him. This is especially helpful if the ancestor we are researching had common name. The fact that both units are listed here tells us that unlike the CMSRs, all pension records referring to a single individual are compiled into the same folder. If a widow or dependent had applied, those pension applications/certificates would be in the same folder.
The table in the middle of the card is the part that gives us the important information when it comes to requesting the pension. Reading from left to right - under "date of filing" - 1890 July 25 - is the date that Marion applied for his pension. This is important - if we knew that Marion had died in 1889, for example, than the Marion Snyder who applied for a pension in 1890 could not be our Marion.
The row indicates who is applying for the pension - the numbers are in the "invalid" row, so it was the soldier applying for the pension. Although invalid is a term that has come to mean someone disabled through injury or illness, it doesn't always mean that in the context of a pension. However, to receive a pension, soldiers often had to prove illness or injury that meant affected their quality of life after the war. For example - if they couldn't prefer the same job that they had before the war due to an injury, and could not therefore support themselves in the same way as they could before the war, they could apply for a pension.
The first column is the application number and the second column is the certificate number. Really, the most important number is the last one - the certificate number. This is the number that everything is filed under. The numbers are really meaningless at this point - they are really only given meaning in the context of the National Archives and pulling the record. The National Archives is made up of stacks - rows upon rows of records. The pension records are sorted into boxes and organized by number. Providing this number to the Archives will tell the "puller" - the person who goes and retrieves the record - where in the maze of stacks to go to find the particular record you want. But we'll cover that in a later post.
The last column is the state Marion filed for his pension from - Ohio. This doesn't always have to be the same state where the soldier served from. Here's something to keep in mind when searching ancestry.com and fold3.com for the indexes - Ancestry's index is searchable by state filed from, while Fold3's is searchable by the state served from.
At the bottom is listed the Attorney that Marion went through to apply for his pension. Meaningless, except for the fact that there were several big name attorneys in Washington DC that were almost exclusively pension attorneys, judging by the number of pensions they sponsored.
Let's look at one more index card.
This is the pension for John Doe.
We see that John Doe is an alias for John Brinnan. He served in Co. D of the 198th Regiment in the New York infantry. There are numbers in the second row of the central table - this tells us that John's widow applied for his pension to be transferred to her after his death. Her name is given in the name of dependents section just below the soldier's name - Hattie Brinnan. But since there is only a number in the application column, this means that she applied for the pension but her request was not approved. The dates on the far left are telling - John applied for the pension in 1910 and Hattie applied in 1920, meaning that John had died sometime between those two dates.
Here's an important note - see that number at the very bottom of the card? C2469705. This is called the "C number" - creative, I know. Basically, when the pensions were transferred from the Bureau of Pensions - a sub-section of the Department of the Interior - to the Department of Veteran's Affairs (VA) when the VA was created in 1930, the VA decided to renumber any active pension files. This number is important - if a C number exists, this is the number that the pension will be filed under and the one that the Archives needs to retrieve the file.
There is no hard and fast rule for where the pensions are located but generally pre-WWI pensions are located at the National Archives in DC, post-WWI are in St. Louis, and random pensions are still with the VA.
to be continued...
So that's it! A brief - it ended up not so brief I know - introduction into military records and their indexes. Coming up: how to request the records from the National Archives, and what is in the files. If you have ideas for posts or a question that you'd like me to answer, feel free to send it my way at k.ladd.research@gmail.com!
Disclaimer: I am not an expert. I have a lot of knowledge and experience but if I got anything wrong, please let me know!
*Amusing - I started writing this post in January of 2015. Lots of stuff happened which took me away from posting for a while. One of those things that took me away - my "friend Joe" is now my husband Joe. :D
