A Union soldier left two federal records: the army's account of his service, and the pension paperwork that followed him, often for forty years, and often past his death into his widow's old age. A Union sailor left one. Some men left a third no family expects: a court-martial transcript. We read all of them.
Most families have one or the other and don't know the second exists. Read together, they cover the battlefield and the hearth.
What the army wrote down while he served.
Available as its own report, and it's the one record every soldier has: Union, Confederate, and United States Colored Troops. Not every man drew a pension, but every man left a service record.
What the government asked about for the next forty years.
The compiled service record is a jacket of cards the War Department assembled from muster rolls, hospital registers, and prison records, one jacket per soldier. For a United States Colored Troops soldier, the descriptive book entry inside it, age, height, birthplace, occupation, is often the first federal document that names him at all, and the birthplace is frequently the only record of it that exists anywhere. Mexican War service records use the same jackets, and the same report reads them.
What a service record cannot do: put your ancestor at a battle. The regiment being at Antietam is not proof he was. His own muster roll entries for those months are the evidence, and our report builds his personal present-and-absent timeline, never the regiment's assumed one.
A pension was money, and every page in the file exists because someone asked the government to pay and the government demanded proof. That's why the files are rich: a widow proving her marriage had to put her maiden name, her wedding date, the officiant, and her children's birth dates under oath, and it's why they must be read carefully. Money on the line produces honest mistakes, fading memories, and the occasional lie. Our report shows both sides of every disagreement and tells you which reading the evidence favors, and why.
Union sailors. For a sailor there is no service record to order: his service lives scattered across ships' rolls that were never gathered per man. The Navy pension file is often the best single record of a sailor that exists, and our Navy report is the first of its kind built to read one: aliases traced the way the Bureau traced them, and every vessel's wartime service verified.
A Union pension was governed by a stack of acts that kept moving for sixty years, and most of what looks like a change in a man's fortunes is really Congress changing the rule. A pension that suddenly appears in 1890 is usually the Dependent Pension Act, which dropped the requirement that the disability come from the war: half the surviving veterans re-filed, so one man's file often carries two claim numbers under two acts, and that is one pension history, not two men. A rate that jumps in 1907 or 1912 is the age pensions, not a worsening wound. A lump sum in 1879 is the Arrears Act. A widow dropped and later restored to the roll is the remarriage rules, not a scandal.
We read these acts from the statutes themselves, so your report names the one your ancestor's claim was filed under, says what it required, and separates the man from the legislation. And the loyalty bar that kept former Confederates off the Union rolls is reported as the statute it was, never as a verdict on the man. More about the statutory backing.
Fictional soldiers, real document types, so no real family's file is published, and you can judge the work before you spend a dollar.
A widow's file read end to end: the marriage proved, the children named, and two death dates weighed in the open.
Read the report → Civil War · Pension with photographSome files hold more than paperwork. A widow proves her marriage with her husband's letters and his inscribed portrait: reproduced in the report as plates, exactly as filed.
Read the report → Civil War · CombinedService record and pension read against each other, with every conflict between them identified and resolved.
Read the report → Civil War · Navy pensionAn alias traced the way the Bureau traced it, and the wartime service of his ships verified.
Read the report →You send the file you already have. Don't have it yet? Here is exactly how to get it: most families can order it this week.
A court-martial in the family? That record has its own page.
We're opening in stages, by record type. The more you tell us, the sooner we get to yours.
We'll be in touch when your record type opens. If you told us you're still waiting on a file, we'll send you the ordering instructions in the meantime.