These guides are free and complete, whether or not you ever order a report from us. Most families can locate and order their ancestor's file inside a week, and many of these records are already scanned and waiting.
A pension index card, a soldier's name in a database, a card from Ancestry or Fold3: that's the doorway, not the file. The full file behind it usually runs dozens of pages. Pick your war's guide below and it walks you to the file itself. That's the record we read.
Find your war's guide ↓ The file itself (a PDF of page scans)A pension file becomes a Pension report. A service record (the thin jacket of muster cards, sometimes called a CMSR) becomes a Service record report. A trial record becomes a Court-martial report. Whatever you're holding, there's a complete free sample of the matching report.
See the matching sample → Both records for one soldierThe service record and the pension file were kept by different offices and rarely meet. Read together, they confirm each other, correct each other, and catch what each one missed. It's the report with the most to work with.
See a combined sample →The pension index card, the complete file from the National Archives, and the service record that's a separate order.
Read the guide → GuideEighty thousand files, already scanned. Finding yours takes minutes if you know where the index is.
Read the guide → GuideThe widows' pension files are free to view online, a rarity, and the bounty-land files are a separate hunt.
Read the guide → GuideThe service records are on Fold3; the pension and bounty-land files are one NARA order, often literally one, since they are interfiled.
Read the guide → GuideThe 1898 index is online for every state; the service records themselves are online for only some. Knowing which one you are looking at is the whole trick.
Read the guide → GuideThe federal service record, state by state, and why the pension, if there is one, lives in a state archive instead.
Read the guide →Before 1900, America raised its armies by company, and a company came from a place. A captain recruited his own town and county; brothers, cousins, and neighbors signed the same roll in the same week; and ten such companies, often from adjoining counties, became a regiment. Your ancestor didn't join "the army." He joined a captain he probably knew, at a courthouse or a crossroads store he could walk to.
So every search starts with geography. Fix where the family lived in the enlistment years, then ask which companies were raised there. County histories, the state adjutant general's reports, and hometown newspapers all name them. If an index search turns up three men with your ancestor's name, the one in the company raised two towns over is almost always yours, and the one raised three states away almost never is.
This is why the company letter matters as much as the regiment number, and it's why the files repay the effort: a pension file's witnesses are usually those same neighbors, decades later, swearing to what they saw as young men. Find the place and you find the company. Find the company and the file finds you.
We're opening in stages, by record type. The more you tell us, the sooner we get to yours.
Start getting the file now. The guides above walk you through your war step by step, and the file is the longest part of the journey. The report takes days once it's in hand.
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