kevikens
2nd Lieutenant
- Joined
- Jun 7, 2013
- Location
- New Jersey
Sometimes I think I know all there is to know about the Civil War, actually something impossible, but... . Anyway I picked up a book recently, Military Service Records at the National Archives (Reference Information Paper 109) compiled in 2007 by Trevor Plante. I learned three things. The first many of you may know, which I did not, was that the US federal Government eventually paid pensions to surviving Confederate soldiers and their widows. OK, it was rather late, 1959, but still I did not know that. I knew that former Confederate states did pay pensions to indigent Confederate soldiers and widows but so too did Kentucky, Missouri and Oklahoma. The big surprise was discovering that the US Government approved permanent Confederate tombstones for Confederate soldiers who wound up being buried in national cemeteries and a few year later for them interred at private cemeteries, with slight differences. Confederate tombstones, of the same size as the Union headstones, did not have the Union Shield and were to be given pointed tops as opposed to the Union stones which had rounded ones. A shout out to my wife who spotted this book at a flea market for fifty cents and knew a good buy when she spotted one..