Tika & War of 1812 Pension Records

War of 1812 Project to Digitize Pension Records

Recently the Federation of Genealogical Societies announced the donation of $135,000 to the “Preserve the Pensions” War of 1812 Pension Project. The donation is a generous gift from the estate of the late Jon Stedman in memory of his mother, Ardath Stedman. It will be used to help preserve and digitize the War of 1812 Pension records for all services (Army, Marine, and Navy).

In conjunction with the National Archives & Records Administration, fold3, and Ancestry.com, FGS is helping to digitize 180,000 extremely fragile pension applications representing an estimated 7.2 million pages of War of 1812 Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Application Files. This year marks the 200^th anniversary of the start of the War of 1812, a war many consider our country’s second Revolutionary War, which gave the nation a sense of complete independence from Great Britain.

http://www.navyhistory.org/2012/07/war-of-1812-project-to-digitize-pension-records/

Tika burped as we settled into our chair after her dinner to learn about the War of 1812 and especially the project to digitize these records and so make them available to us. I had already done some Google searching and found this bit from the Naval Historical Foundation's website. I did not realize that there were 7.2 million pages of papers in these files.

Getting these records digitized and searchable to us is certainly a huge and exciting project and I'm proud to say I have contributed, my society has made a donation and I, personally, "ring the bell" for this project whenever I have the opportunity. 

Whether or not you had an ancestor who was involved in the War of 1812, I hope you will choose to donate to the fund to get these records digitized.  Did you know that Ancestry.com will match your society's donation???

By now, Tika was snoring. She's from Idaho, remember, and has no War of 1812 ancestry.