We are fascinated by the remarkable stories found within military pension files. They often contain valuable details about family history, as told through military veterans themselves, or through their widows and dependents who provided evidence of their relationship to a soldier.

As a researcher, did you know you can help uncover these stories by digitizing records in our Innovation Hub in Washington, DC? You can scan military pension records, bounty land files, and more. You take home a digital copy of your scans, while we upload a copy to the Catalog, attributed to you. Learn more about how you can make access happen in our Innovation Hub.

Today we share a few of the interesting stories recently found within pension files while scanning in the Innovation Hub. What will you discover when you scan with us?

Bettie Sugar was born into slavery in Alabama and lived enslaved in the Creek Nation for much of her life. She married a man named Peter Smith, also enslaved. After the war and emancipation, they continued living together for a few years, until Peter apparently left and married someone else.

Some years later, Bettie married George Sugar. When George died around the turn of the century, Bettie filed for his pension. The Pension Office inquired if she had divorced her first husband, making her George Sugar’s legal widow.  However, she didn’t have a legal divorce while living in the Creek Nation. She explained, “I never got a divorce from Peter Smith but when he married again I thought I had the right to marry again.” The Bureau of Pensions agreed: if a marriage was legal according to the law of the land where the person married, it was good enough for the Pension Office. The same rule applied to divorces. Also of note in this file is a copy of Bettie Sugar’s assets. She inherited from her husband seventy head of cattle, nine horses, 160 acres of land and $12,500 in cash.

Louisa Phillips applied for a Widow’s Pension after the death of her husband Ervin Phillips in 1881. Louisia and Ervin were married on April 11, 1844 and had fourteen children together.  At the time of Phillip’s death they had three children under the age of 16 living at home in Central Missouri. Louisa could not read or write, so she had help from her brother Daniel. Daniel did all of the interviews found within the application, and while literate, he was not a proficient speller. Here’s an example of a statement from Elisha White written for Louisa Phillip’s application on page 17:

"I lived most of the time A naibar to Ervin Phillips and have none him ever sence the ware and have warked with him and have sene him once a month and have herd him complain of Cidney and Bladder disease the results of Cronick direa"

Beginning August 15, 1890, Louisa Phillips received $8 a month from her husband’s Civil War pension until her death on May 14, 1909.

In this file, Private Lewis Martin's official Certificate of Disability for Discharge includes an image of Martin, seated, showing the two amputated limbs he'd received in battle at the Siege of Petersburg on July 30th 1864. Photographs are a rare find in pension files. Martin was plagued by pain from his amputation sites as well as where shots had grazed his shoulder and temple, but did go on to marry Mary Jones after the war in 1869. His file documents requests for an increase in his pension, which raised from an original pension of $20 to $50 per month over the decades. He dropped off the Pension Office's rolls in 1895.