Early in my research, I failed to locate a pension for him. I did not give it much thought at the time. The family was (so I thought) well-documented during their post-1853 immigration to Illinois from Germany and I had their Germanic origins, including the village of birth for George and his immigrant parents. The pension file wasn’t probably going to help me and so I didn’t concern myself with why I couldn’t find one.<\/p>\n
After all, Trautvetter gets spelled 1,230, 023 ways. I probably was not using the spelling the military had used.<\/p>\n
Turns out spellings were not the problem. If I had obtained the compiled service record, I would have discovered the likely reason he had no pension record:<\/p>\n
he deserted<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
There’s a little more to it than that which we will see in a future blog post.<\/p>\n
Astute readers will know that there’s actually an index to Civil War pensions that is not organized by name. It’s organized by unit. Not finding him in that index would have indicated that the spelling of his name was not the problem. That index is actually called\u00a0the “Organization Index to Pension Files of Veterans Who Served Between 1861 and 1900” (NARA microfilm publication T289).<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s atypical for a Union veteran of the Civil War (or his widow) to not receive a military pension if he or his widow qualified for one. Pensions that can’t be found create the same questions in a genealogists mind when any expected record can’t be located: am I looking in the wrong way? am […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3080\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"dishonorable-denied\"](\"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/dishonorable-denied.jpg\")
<\/a>Such was the case with George A. Trautvetter.<\/p>\n