Free, plain-language guides from the research behind every report: how to read a pension file, and the legal worlds a pension or a court-martial was created in. Read them whether or not you ever order anything.
One is a plain walk through a pension file. The other three read the governing law whole from the original acts, and say so wherever a statute could not be read directly, never presenting a secondary summary as verified law.
What is actually inside a Union pension file and in what order, what the application and certificate numbers mean, the clerks' shorthand, and the traps that fool most readers: a rejection that was later reversed, a payment below the rate, a sixty-year-old memory.
Read the guide → Researcher's guideAll fourteen states, each read from its own session laws. Why a payment below the stated rate means nothing, how the class letters name the legal test, and the widow's marriage line that moved eleven times in one state.
Read the guide → Researcher's guideThe Revolution to the War with Spain, read from the Statutes at Large. Invalid, service, and widows' pensions; bounty land; the loyalty bar Congress lifted one class at a time; and the rates that date a file.
Read the guide → Researcher's guideThe two codes behind a court-martial, the articles a soldier or sailor was charged under, and the review chain a sentence had to survive before it was final, so often ending better than the family story remembers.
Read the guide →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.