Confederate Widows' Pensions

[18thVirginia]

South Carolina

General information about South Carolina veterans and widows pensions can be found at http://www.archivesindex.sc.gov/onlinearchives/Terms/Series/SeriesDescriptions/L46118.html

From 1887, widows could apply for pensions for soldiers who'd died in service. In 1860, eligibility was extended to poor veterans and poor widows, both subject to means tests. Few applications from this period survive.

In 1919, the pension system was revised again, requiring all existing pensioners to reapply. All veterans and widows over 60 who had married before 1890 were now eligible. The ages for widows were change to 55 in 1920, then to 50 in 1921 and 45 in 1930.

 

[18thVirginia]

BTW, this thread is an amazing resource for all kinds of things- it's crazy how much information was required so viewing these files can give someone a LOT of news on ancestors.

Was reading about pensions for USCT in Mississippi and the references were all to the pension files, so it finally dawned on me that there must be a lot more information in the individual files than I had realized. You're absolutely correct, when I went back and read through the entire file, on fold3 and the ancestry.com archives, on my ancestress, I found out all kinds of details about where they were living, that they were refugees from their previous home in Eastern Tennessee, in addition to the details on how that great great great grandfather had died, etc.

The pension files also seem to verify the trends that have been mentioned by historians, like fewer men available because of the generation lost to the war so the young women married older men, as in Mrs. A. F. Forsythe, where she was 26 and he was 41.

USCT pensions will be covered in another thread.

 

[18thVirginia]

Oklahoma

http://digitalprairie.ok.gov/cdm/landingpage/collection/pensions

To get a pension in Oklahoma, veterans had to prove that they were honorably discharged and had at least one year's residency in Oklahoma before they came to apply for a pension. They could not own more than $2,000 in property and have an income of $500 or less.

Annie, if you want to see the dealings of widows with the Pension bureaucracy, check out the lengthy correspondence between Annie Brinlee and the Pension commissioner, which goes on for many, many pages. Mrs. Brinlee goes into a lengthy description of why she and her husband were living apart when he died. They had gone to visit children and she went back to the Veterans Home and he stayed with children and then passed on.

There's also a lengthy correspondence about Mrs. Brinlee going to visit her own children in Arkansas and whether she's lived out of state for too long to qualify for benefits. When I was just out of college, I worked for a dept. of public welfare and dealt with Old Age pensions. The correspondence reminds me of some of the older guys in the office who had worked only for the Dept. of Public Welfare and spent lots of time demanding that the old people furnish information to suit their personal bureaucratic needs. I used to point out that we'd spent more of the state's money while discussing the $3 or $5 dollars' difference in the pension than it would cost the state in an entire year.

Annie Brinlee http://digitalprairie.ok.gov/cdm/singleitem/collection/pensions/id/9154

The file runs to 175 pages.

 

[FZ11]

Interesting subject. Many served that are not recorded in the pension records because their income or assets were too high to qualify for the pension.