Complete reports, start to finish, including the parts where the record wouldn't answer the question. The pension and service-record soldiers are invented so that no real family's file is published. The exceptions are clearly marked "real file": a Navy court-martial from 1865, Confederate state pension files that the state archives themselves publish as free public records, the National Archives files of Lt. Col. David Stricker of the 2nd Delaware from the founder's own regimental research, and the service record of Lewis Powell, the Lincoln assassination conspirator, all of them public history rather than private families' files. Two Revolutionary War files join them, both from the National Archives: the pension claim of James Berry of the Delaware “Flying Camp,” which the government never allowed, and the bounty-land file of Robert Dailey, which holds a warrant card belonging to another man entirely. Every document type, tier, flag and citation is exactly what you'd receive.
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 → Pension · with photographA widow proves her marriage with her husband's letters and his inscribed portrait, and the report reproduces them as plates, exactly as filed.
Read the report → Service recordMuster rolls month by month, a hospital stay, and the papers in the jacket: the record every soldier has.
Read the report → CombinedService record and pension read against each other, with every conflict identified and resolved.
Read the report → Carded medical recordsFive cards, read alone: camp sickness at Chancellorsville, typhoid at Chester, and the City Point card that ends it. Every diagnosis quoted exactly as the surgeon wrote it, and the reason these cards exist at all (pension verification) pointing straight at the file to order next.
Read the report → United States Colored TroopsIsaac Freeland's descriptive book carries the fact most families search hardest for: where he was born. His jacket holds a Certificate of Freedom, an X-mark signature, a promotion, and a letter home about the wife he hadn't seen since enlisting. All of it read with the care these records deserve.
Read the report → Navy pensionAn alias traced the way the Bureau traced it, and the wartime service of his ships verified.
Read the report → Combined · 2nd Delaware · real filesA lieutenant colonel's service record and his widow's pension file, read together: a wartime telegram re-read by a church marriage register, a one-digit conflict between two archives shown rather than smoothed over, and a pension that began the day he fell at Spotsylvania. National Archives records, from the founder's own research on the regiment his camp is named for.
Read the report →His last surviving roll marks him absent without leave. The capture record, dated the day before, says otherwise.
Read the report → Historian registerThe identical Confederate jacket, delivered in the historian register: quick-reference table, per-roll service timeline, engagements only as the record states them, every fact tiered and cited. Built so a researcher's forty memos stack, the edition project orders are quoted in.
Read the memo → State pension · Texas · real fileA real 1899 Texas application, a free public record of the Texas State Archives, read end to end: the sworn property schedule, the comrades' depositions, and the War Department's thin reply named as records loss, not a verdict.
Read the report → State pension · Florida · real fileA real Florida file, a free public record of the State Archives of Florida, spanning a veteran's claim and his widow's, with the veteran's own letters reproduced as plates, exactly as filed.
Read the report → Service record · 2nd Florida · real fileLewis Powell, later hanged as a Lincoln assassination conspirator, was first a nineteen-year-old private from Hamilton County, Florida. His service record follows him to Gettysburg, a wound, a capture, and a hospital escape, and closes with a single compiler's line about how his paperwork ends. The report reads his file exactly as it reads any soldier's, and says only what the record says.
Read the report → State pension · historian register · real fileThe technical source-memo edition of the Clendennen file above: tiered citations on every fact, a claimed-versus-verified table, conflicts adjudicated on stated reasoning, and the memo's own limits stated in print — what the file establishes about who this man is, and what only correlation outside the file can prove.
Read the memo → Combined · Texas · real filesThe same Texan's service jacket and 1899 pension file cross-checked: a $50 bounty confirmed by three independent records decades apart, and the rolls' silence honestly named while his comrades carry the story.
Read the report →In 1845, aged 85 and living in Cincinnati, James Berry swore to service he gave as a teenager in the Delaware “Flying Camp” in 1776. His discharge was long gone, handed years before to a man who had since died, and Delaware could confirm only his name on a single pay roll. He was never placed on the pension rolls; by 1849 attorneys were writing on behalf of his heirs. We publish it because a great many Revolutionary files look exactly like this one.
Read the report → Revolutionary War · Bounty land · Real archival fileRobert Dailey was a matross — an artillery private — discharged from the American Army at Head-Quarters in June 1783, and granted a hundred acres for it. He did not keep them; the right passed through several hands and the warrant was withdrawn in 1809 by an assignee. And filed among his papers is a warrant card belonging to a different man of the same surname, Solomon Dailey of Rhode Island, apparently placed there on name alone. The report gives that card its own section and keeps the two men apart.
Read the report → Revolutionary War · PensionAn 1818 claim, an 1820 property schedule, and what an old soldier owned when he swore he owned nothing worth taking.
Read the report → Revolutionary War · Service record & pensionJosiah's muster cards place him at Valley Forge and White Plains in 1778, corroborating the service he swore to in 1818. Monmouth appears only in his 1832 declaration, fourteen years later, and the report keeps it exactly there: a memory the rolls neither confirm nor refute, labeled for what it is.
Read the report → War of 1812 · Service record & pensionIn 1850 Amos swore he served under Captain Vansant, and the government found no such service. The rolls in his service record tell the rest: the tours were real, the captain was Mercer, and Amos corrected himself five years later. Both files read against each other, the way the Pension Office's own auditors once did.
Read the report → War of 1812 · Pension & bounty landA bounty-land warrant from the 1850s and a widow's pension from the 1870s, chained into one family's paper trail.
Read the report →William Braidwood, engineer of the ironclad Chimo, tried at the Brooklyn Navy Yard: the charges named against the 1862 Navy code, the dismissal read against it, and the missing final review flagged, not guessed.
Read the report → U.S. Army · 1863 · real fileA 2nd Delaware private tried for desertion after Fredericksburg: charge, testimony, the Not Guilty, and the general's approval, from the original proceedings.
Read the report →We ran a real file, the James Berry Revolutionary War pension published above, through the same AI with no rules, and published everything: the full transcript of that run, and the side-by-side comparison. The file is a public National Archives record, so the experiment is repeatable: pull the same pages from the digitized pension series and check both of us. What you're actually paying for is on the front page.