The Case Of Oops! Mr. Williams: Pre-1917 Pension Gold!

We place stacks of record requests every day at NARA facilities, so it's no surprise that sometimes we get an 'Oops!' file. In this case, while looking for a Mr. L. Williams who served in the Civil War we received a beautiful 130 page Pre-1917 pension ... for a completely unrelated Mr. L Williams. Since we can't resist a good fat file we took a quick look through his paperwork. What a gold mine, and a perfect example of the kinds of information that can turn up in pension files!

This Lewis Williams served in Company G of the 3rd (West) Virginia Cavalry. Because he was disabled during the war, he applied for an invalid pension. We get to hear from Lewis himself the story of how he suffered heart and lung damage from a case of the measles in 1863, eventually leaving him unable to work and stuck mostly indoors. A fair portion of his file is a stack of claim and denial letters that offer deep detail about his health and his war experiences. At one point, he even blames lousy Army food for his stomach problems!

Lewis finally won his pension, seemingly by sheer persistence. By the time he passed away in 1901 he was receiving a regular pension to help support his large family, and his medical conditions are documented with frequent updates. It's at this point that his file transforms from historically interesting to genealogical gold, because his widow Juliette needed his pension money to help raise her five youngest children. Widow's Pension papers were added to the original veteran's file for convenience so that a widow's claim could be easily cross referenced by using the original claim papers.

It's at this point that his file transforms from historically interesting to genealogical gold, because his widow Juliette needed his pension money to help raise her five youngest children. Widow's Pension papers were added to the original veteran's file for convenience so that a widow's claim could be easily cross referenced by using the original claim papers.

For Juliette to prove her claim, she provided a wealth of information about her family and her marriage. We found an Illinois marriage certificate and an 1891 birth certificate for a daughter that tallied the number of children born to the couple, many of whom are listed with birth dates on another page. We have an affidavit from 1903 in her own handwriting that describes the birth of her son George in 1888 and notes that neither she nor her husband could read or write at the time of his birth. Juliette even had to send in a copy of her husband's divorce decree from a first wife and two children whom he abandoned in Ohio! There's a nice surprise that might prove useful to solve an otherwise inexplicable DNA connection!

Best of all, this pension manages to solidly locate Lewis and his family from his birth in Ohio through his service in West Virginia, then back to Ohio and on to Illinois. It solves the problem of the missing 1890 census in one tidy record!

Sadly, Mr. Williams and Juliette are not destined for a lucky client. Instead, we've shared them here to illustrate the potential value of a Pre-1917 Pension to non-military genealogical research. What gems are waiting in your ancestor's pension file?