(This is Part 2 of the Civil War Pensions blog post. Part 1 appears on the A Week of Genealogy Blog)
2. You may hear from NARA that the Pension File has moved to NARA, St. Louis. This is especially true for many Civil War pensions that were filed or paid past the early 1920’s. At that point, you need to contact NARA-STL to investigate if the pension is really there. One would think that the National Archives would check for you but that rarely happens.
3. When you contact NARA, St. Louis, you may be told that they do not have the pension file and to contact the Veteran’s Administration. Usually pensions that were handled by the VA office have claim file numbers assigned to them. Veteran claim file numbers will start with a “C” whereas widow claim files will start with “XC”.
When a VA held pension closed, it was to be sent to the National Archives for storage but sometimes this didn’t happen. NARA in Washington DC has some of the C and XC pensions that fall between 2,400,000 – 2,650,000 like the two pensions above. The remaining pensions, that have claim numbers (we’ve seen pension index cards that have XC numbers near 7 million) should be in St. Louis or were lost in the shuffle over the last century.
4. If your pension is located in St. Louis, you now have two choices:
A) Pay NARA to provide a black & white photocopy (starting at $80 for the first 100 pages and $0.70 a page after. A 200 page pension would cost $150) and get at the end of a very long waiting line that may range from 2 months to 9 months.
B) Engage a retrieval service like Twisted Twigs. Twisted Twigs Genealogy will personally walk your request into the St Louis facility and make color digital images of the complete pension file for $50, and your wait time (depending on when the pension file is presented to us on-site) averages 60 days or less.
Have a wonderful weekend!
7th Generation Detroit Family Historian and NARA Records Retrieval Expert, Deidre Erin Denton of Twisted Twigs Genealogy and Margaret McMahon, author of “Researching Your U.S. WWI Army Ancestors, have teamed up for a series of blog posts to show you the path to researching the military records for WWI, WWII, the Korean War and more at NARA. Because of your connection to your ancestor, you are the best teller of his story, and with these records you can write and share a very personal military history.