The Kindness of Strangers’ Pension Files

I’ve been researching Robert. He was a soldier in the Revolutionary War. In his pension application he made many statements. He listed his units and the surnames of those units’ commanding officers. It was very good information. I learned where his units gathered, the paths they took on the march and the name of the battle in which he fought. All very interesting, but he said nothing that might give me a hint about his family except for the name of the county where he was living in the 1770s.

When Robert was a rather old man, he testified concerning another man’s pension application. He testified that he knew that the other man had been in the war because he had been in the same unit as Robert’s father. They were very different in age, but they had been comrade’s-in-arms. Frustratingly, he never named his father. He mentioned him a few times in his testimony, but he never named him. After the main body of Robert’s testimony, the man who was taking it all down must have asked a few questions. The questions were not recorded, but suddenly the statements that were recorded became staccato. They were disjoint, the sentences not following at all from each other. One of those non sequiturs was the statement, “My father’s name was Robert.” Ah, the kindness of strangers…or at least of strangers’ pension records.

So his father was Robert. Is that sure? It makes perfect sense for a son to share his name with his father. It is also possible for an old man to give the wrong answer, for him to simply state the first name that comes to mind, which just might be his own name. So was his father Robert or not? There are a lot of documents which might corroborate Robert as the son of Robert, but the obvious searches turned up nothing. A lowly tax list turned out to be magical. It was the kind of record that makes you want to jump for genealogical joy. It listed Robert and his son Robert. They were in the right place at the right time. The list was prepared in sections by different people. The man who prepared the section with the Roberts had an unusual surname that happened to be the same as the name of the captain of one of Robert Jr’s units. One of the other men on the list was actually called captain and his whole name matched another one of Robert Jr’s officers. The only thing that might make it better was if Robert Sr’s comrade-in-arms from the pension records was also in that section, and sure enough, he was. It is the right path. Now to follow it!

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