Military Documents: The Crucial to Your Household Tree? from ElwynnZieme's blog

Were your ancestors war people? Feel it or perhaps not, critical clues to your family's history may just be hiding out in military archives - and locating them could be simpler than you think. Even when you're not sure whether any of your ancestors ever served in the military, it can pay to do some digging. The payback could be huge.

First some background about what you are looking for and why. Fires in 1800 and 1814 damaged the files of the American Army and Navy servicemen that were held at the Conflict Department. In 1894, an endeavor was made to revive these documents from numerous options via abstracts, and individual packages of files were created for each serviceman.

That packet of files was known as a Collected Support Record, and it contained data including position, military device, time of admission in to bounty land records service, and discharge, or death. Additionally, it may possibly contain other data, such as for example age, place of start, and host to home on enlistment.

Indices to Gathered Military Company Documents

In the U.S., the found Compiled Military Service Files to numerous wars can be found at the National Archives. They range from the Progressive War, the War of 1812, various Indian wars, and the Civil War. All of the indices have already been microfilmed. Should you choose find your ancestor's Created Company Report, it could imply that you access a lot of different information!

Like, in the event that you understand that the ancestor offered in the Innovative War, the pension file indices may show whether he or his beneficiaries have a pension file. When they did, you should have access to a lot of details about the family.

As you will see, if you're fortunate to locate your ancestors'pension files, you'll get a precise image of what occurred to them in their years of support, so they're positively documents value seeking.

But don't stop there - go ahead and take to to get into the entire pension files. Why? Since when conflict masters and their widows requested pensions following different conflicts, like the Progressive Conflict and the Civil War, they had to show the births, marriages and deaths of the quick household so they may get the funds. Often, the only real evidence they had of the events were pages from household Bibles. So the pages were cut out and submitted. These pages it's still in the files! Discuss uncovering an item of your family's record!