{"id":2405,"date":"2016-03-29T06:26:04","date_gmt":"2016-03-29T06:26:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/?p=2405"},"modified":"2016-03-29T06:26:04","modified_gmt":"2016-03-29T06:26:04","slug":"is-it-worth-it-to-get-the-civil-war-pension","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/?p=2405","title":{"rendered":"Is It Worth It to Get the Civil War Pension?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the theoretical genealogical world, one gets a copy of everything and cost is no object.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately most of us do not live in the theoretical world.<\/p>\n

I’ve started working on a family that I’ve not worked on in some time and discovered that one of the sons-in-law of the ancestor in question (Andrew Trask, born around 1813 probably in Massachusetts and died in the 1880s in Mercer County, Illinois) served in the Civil War.<\/p>\n

The question: do I need the son-in-laws’s pension?<\/p>\n

One school of thought is that I need it because I should track all the relatively closely related people down as much as possible. The problem is obtaining a copy of the pension will cost me money–which is how most offline records are acquired.<\/p>\n

I need to think about what the pension likely contains and what my research goals are.<\/p>\n

I want to document Andrew as much as possible and do the same for his children. I also want to determine the names of his parents.<\/p>\n

The son-in-law in question outlived his wife–who was the daughter of Andrew Trask. As a result there will be no<\/strong><\/em> widow’s pension which typically provides some detail about the wife, her marriage to the soldier, and (in some cases, her life before and after marriage to the soldier).<\/p>\n

There will just be the soldier’s application for a pension in which he will typically have to document:<\/p>\n