The federal government holds one record for a Confederate soldier: the compiled service record, assembled after the war from captured Confederate rolls and from the prison and parole records the Union kept. It is honest, it is incomplete, and the difference between those two things is where most family stories go wrong.
Confederate muster rolls thin out badly in the war's last year, not because the men left, but because the paperwork did. A jacket that goes quiet after 1864 usually reflects records loss, and a report that reads that silence as desertion, discharge, or death slanders a man the record never convicted. Our report states what the last surviving roll shows, dates it, and stops. Where the trail continues, it is often in Union records inside the same jacket: capture memoranda, prison registers, the oath of allegiance, the parole at the end.
There is no federal Confederate pension. Pensions came from the individual Southern and border states, generally the state where the veteran or widow lived after the war, mostly beginning in the 1880s: each state under its own acts, with its own forms, its own county boards, and its own archive holding the files today. We now read these state pension files: the report reads the state's own law straight from the printed forms, follows the claim from the county courthouse to the state capital, and cites the file the way the holding archive itself asks to be cited. This was proven on real Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma files, and we have since gone to the source for the rest, so a file from any of the fourteen states arrives to a reading grounded in its own state's law. And when you have both records, the combined report ($149) reads the captured-records jacket and the state pension file against each other: where the surviving rolls corroborate the old comrades' sworn memories, the report says so, and where the rolls simply run out, that silence is named as records loss, never held against the man.
There was never one Confederate pension. Each state wrote its own, and they are genuinely different laws. Georgia ran four separate pension classes at once. Virginia lettered its grades A through H and barred militia-only men outright. Tennessee pensioned Union and Confederate veterans alike. Mississippi paid the indigent Black servants of soldiers from the same fund, at the same rate, as the soldiers. Missouri counted the Jackson state militia and paid a flat ten dollars a month. The classes, the rates, the residence rules, and above all the widow's marriage-date line moved from state to state and decade to decade.
A Confederate state pension is not a Union pension with a different flag on it. These claims were filed decades after the war, to state governments, under laws written in the 1880s and after, in the memorial climate of those years. That shapes what a file was built to say and what it left out, and the report reads it in that light, not as though it were a federal claim of the 1860s.
We went to the source for this, state by state: the pension acts read from the original session laws, not a summary and not a guess. So your report names the exact act your ancestor's claim was filed under, says plainly what it required, and reads a rejection or a rate change against the statute that caused it. A widow's claim, refused one year and allowed the next, usually means the marriage-date line moved, not that she found new proof. Where a state's governing act cannot be confirmed for a particular file, the report says so rather than inventing one. The deepest hands-on file experience behind this service is in Civil War Union records; what brings the same standard to the Confederate states is the method and these acts, read from the session laws rather than remembered. More about the statutory backing.
Every figure above is read from the state's own session laws, not a summary: Georgia's four classes under the Acts of 1887, 1890, 1894, and 1910; Virginia's A through H grades under the Act of March 12, 1912; Tennessee's Union and Confederate rolls under chapter 64 of 1891; Mississippi's servant pensions under the Act of March 22, 1904; Missouri's flat ten dollars under the Act of April 23, 1913.
His last surviving roll marks him absent without leave. The capture record, dated the day before, says otherwise. A Confederate jacket read honestly, including the final year where no rolls survive at all.
Read the report → Confederate · State pension (Texas) · real fileA real 1899 Texas application, read end to end: the sworn property schedule, the comrades' depositions with their cross-questions, and the War Department's thin reply named for what it is, records loss, not a verdict.
Read the report → Confederate · State pension (Florida) · real fileA real Florida file spanning a veteran's claim and his widow's. When the state questioned his service, he wrote back himself, and his letters are reproduced in the report as plates, exactly as filed.
Read the report → Confederate · Combined (Texas) · real filesThe same Texan's captured-records jacket and his 1899 pension file, cross-checked: his $50 bounty confirmed by three independent records decades apart, and the rolls' silence after 1862 named for what it is while his old comrades carry the story.
Read the report →You send the file you already have. Don't have it yet? Here is where these records live and how to get yours.
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.