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10 page PDF research guide includes:
Guide for They Swore It Under Oath: The Untold Power of Revolutionary War Pension Depositions
Sometime in the early 1830s, an old man walked into a county courthouse in the Appalachian backcountry and raised his right hand before a judge. He was not there for a land dispute or a tax assessment. He was there to swear, under oath, that he had fought in the American Revolution more than fifty years before. He stated his name. He named his captain and his colonel. He described the month and year he entered service, the militia company he joined, the places he marched, and the engagements he survived. He recalled the names of men who had served alongside him. The clerk wrote it all down, the judge signed it, and the deposition went to Washington. That scene played out in thousands of courthouses from Pennsylvania to Georgia, and the result is approximately 80,000 pension and bounty-land-warrant files now held at the National Archives as Record Group 15, reproduced on NARA Microfilm Publication M804. The file indexed under R is not empty. A rejection means the last claim was denied, not that the file contains nothing; researchers who skip R files leave some of the richest documentation in the collection untouched.
What's Inside
- Pension act timeline covering every federal law from 1776 through 1855, with who was eligible, what applicants had to prove, what documents are likely in each file type, and the genealogical value of each act's records
- Pension number prefix decoder covering S (survivor), W (widow), R (rejected), and BLW (bounty-land warrant), with what to expect in each file and what cautions apply
- Document-by-document inventory of what a pension file may contain, including sworn depositions, household property inventories, witness affidavits, widow's depositions, marriage proof documents, pension office correspondence, and original discharge papers
- Primary access point table covering NARA Online Catalog, Fold3, FamilySearch, and Ancestry with coverage and best-use notes for each
- Companion collections table for verifying and extending M804 research, including compiled service records, pension payment ledgers, and Southern Campaigns pension statements
- File identification and service record worksheet for recording deposition testimony field by field alongside cross-references
- Document inventory page and testimony analysis prompts
- Notes pages