riley rampley

We Were MessMates and I Helped His Father Thrash in 1865 or So

The Pension Department contacted Eli Short in 1889 as a part of their investigation into the pension claim of Riley Rampley. Short responded in his own hand a few days later and the letter appears in Rampley’s pension file. Short was not the only comrade of Rampley’s that was contacted by the Department. It’s a […]

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Analyzing Riley

[note: this article originally appeared in the Ancestry.com Daily News  on 8 August 2004. In the interest of being readable, we’re not including citations throughout this piece–Riley served in Company D of the 78th Illinois Volunteer Infantry.] While I doubt that it is the largest Civil War pension file in the National Archives, the two-inch file that […]

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A 1942 Mortgage that Wasn’t

We’ve mentioned affidavits from land records before, but this one from 1942 is a real gem. James Edward Rampley documents three generations of ownership of the farm he owned, going back to his grandfather, James Rampley. Death dates are included along with relationships and additional family information. I’m not certain why this is recorded with […]

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