Requesting Copies of Civil War Service and Pension Records

Copies of Union and Confederate service files and Union pension files are available from the National Archives Order Online. Click on the "Order Reproductions" tab and on "Military Service and Pension Records". For Union soldiers, a complete pension file costs $75. Pension files for Confederates are housed in their separate states. See Confederate pensions for further information. Service files cost $25. Confederate service files on mircrofilm can be borrowed from Family History Centers or are found on Footnote ($). A final option is to hire a professional researcher at the National Archives. Often a professional researcher can provide copies faster and cheaper than by using the online services.

Once you have determined that you have an ancestor who probably was a Union pensioner, obtaining a copy of his pension record is the next step. Union pension files are not microfilmed and must be copied from the files at the National Archives (NARA). NARA does have a copy service. It is $75 for the first 100 pages of a pension file. At this time, it can take as much as a year to receive the file. Often a professional genealogist in Washington D.C. can copy the file much more quickly and for a much lower cost. Pension files are loose papers literally kept in a file under your ancestor’s name. If your ancestor’s pension file is more than 100 pages and you pay $75 for the first 100 pages, there is no guaranteeing that you will get the same pages in the same order when you send for any additional pages. You may have a better chance of getting all the papers in your ancestor’s file by hiring a genealogist to make copies, rather than using NARA’s online service.