While examining Prince Edward County court records for chancery suits, former Local Records Archivist Catherine OBrion found a group of declarations to the justices of the peace of Prince Edward County.  The declarants were Revolutionary War veterans seeking to obtain pensions under an act of Congress passed on 7 June 1832. The applicants present detailed testimony of their time of service during the Revolutionary War. Information found in the declarations include date and location applicants entered into service, names of military companies they served in, names of military commanders they served under, names of fellow soldiers they served with, length of service, their ages, and their places of birth. The declarations also include affidavits from witnesses who could verify information provided by applicants.

The predominant portion of the declarations consists of narratives of the veterans’ tours of duty during the Revolutionary War.  William Hines, age 78, presented an account of his service under General George Rogers Clarke in present-day Kentucky.  Clarke’s army was pursuing Native Americans along the Ohio River.  Hines shared how, during the campaign, he was severely wounded by two musket balls which broke both bones of his right arm below the elbow.  Hines was personally assured by General Clarke that he would receive a pension.  William Worsham, age 80, presented an account of his service from the time the war began in 1775 to the British surrender at Yorktown. He mentions the burning of Norfolk, campaigns in North and South Carolina, skirmishes with Benedict Arnold, and clashes with Cornwallis during which Worsham was taken prisoner by the British.  William Scott, age 74, offers a humorous account of a prank a group of soldiers pulled on their superior officer, a Colonel Morgan, who was unpopular with his troops.  Scott shares that one night, “some persons disposed to shew [sic] their dislike for Colonel Morgan … broke his sword to the hilt, and shaved the main [sic] and tail of his horse.”  Morgan was so angry he refused to grant his troops their discharge papers.

Prince Edward County (Va.) Declarations for Revolutionary War Pensions, 1832 (Barcode number 1202630) are open for research.

-Greg Crawford, Local Records Coordinator

Major Robert Waterman Hunter, a veteran and an officer in the 2^nd Regiment of Virginia Volunteers, was appointed the first Secretary of Virginia Military Records by Governor Andrew J. Montague in 1904.  Hunter served in this capacity until 1910 when he was succeeded by Joseph Virginius Bidgood, former Commander of the Grand Camp of Confederate Veterans.  The Office of the Secretary of Virginia Military Records merged into the Adjutant General’s Office in 1911 and became the Department of Confederate Military Records under Bidgood in 1912.  An act of Assembly passed in 1918 abolished the department and their records were transferred to the Virginia State Library.  The result of their work was twenty volumes on Confederate Rosters arranged by unit.

The Library of Virginia houses some sixty-eight cubic feet (62 boxes and 48 volumes) related to the Department of Confederate Military Records, commonly known as the Bidgood Papers.  The collection contains correspondence, muster rolls, scrapbooks, payrolls, news clippings, rosters, printed material, letter books, military orders, photographs, and other items.  Particularly useful are the unit record files which often contain original materials from the Civil War.  Hunter and Bidgood’s correspondence is an underutilized resource that sometimes includes genealogical information or personal recollections of veterans or their families.  Two scrapbooks of obituaries document the deaths of over sixteen hundred Confederate veterans who died between 1910 and 1917.  Also significant are muster rolls and payrolls for militia units stationed in Harper’s Ferry following John Brown’s Raid in 1859.  Last, but not least, there are the aforementioned twenty volumes of Virginia’s Confederate veterans.  The Library of Virginia created an online index to these rosters which provides the name and unit of the veteran.  Though not considered an official roster like the National Register of Compiled Service records, the volumes and database provide easy access to an online list of Virginia’s Confederate veterans.  More importantly, the records of the Department of Confederate Military records represent the Library’s largest collection of Civil War-related materials.

-Craig S. Moore, State Records Appraisal Archivist

For this week’s Veterans’ Day-themed post, I am going to depart from our usual practice of focusing on images, documents, and stories that Library of Virginia archivists uncover as we process collections.  Instead, I would like to share the story of Cecelia Graham and how a chance conversation with my wife led to the emotional discovery of the World War II Separation Notice of Cecelia’s father.

The Virginia World War II Separation Notices was one of the first collections I processed at the Library of Virginia; it contains approximately 250,000 notices for World War II veterans discharged between 1942 and 1950 (with the bulk between 1944 and 1946) who sought employment in Virginia.  A disastrous 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis destroyed a large percentage of Army and Army Air Force records in federal custody for veterans discharged between 1912 and 1960.  The LVA’s collection of separation notices became invaluable to Virginia’s servicemen and their families after the fire.

These records have been part of the Library’s archival collection since 1950 but they were in no order and the Library did not have the resources to process them.  I recognized the importance of the collection and, being young and impatient, I was determined to do “something” about it.  That “something” turned into the largest filing project in the LVA’s history.  From September 1998 to June 2003, I alphabetized approximately 250,000 separation notices.

A few months after I started processing the collection, my wife Kim mentioned the WWII Separation Notices project while trying to explain my job to Ceceilia, her friend and co-worker.  Cecelia’s father, Cecil Graham, served in World War II; she asked Kim if I would search for her father’s record.  I agreed.  We had not developed any access procedures or request forms for the collection yet, so I just wrote Cecil’s name and birth date on a yellow piece of paper and taped it to the wall in my work area.  About a year later, I found Cecil Graham’s record.  He was in the United States Army from 1943 to 1946 and served in both the European and Pacific Theaters.  I made a copy of the record and went back to processing.  When Kim gave it to Cecelia, she began to cry.  Cecelia lost most of her family at a very young age; her father died when she was still a child.  She had no one to tell her stories about her family and knew nothing about her father’s military service.  She treasured this record.  Having a copy of her father’s record was like having a part of him.

Cecelia later called me at home to thank me for finding her father’s record.  She then told me something I’ll never forget.   She had two sets of military dog tags but never knew which belonged to her father and which belonged to her deceased brother, also named Cecil.  Having learned her father’s service number from his separation notice, she could now distinguish which was which.  Finding Cecil Graham’s separation notice is the proudest moment in my 16-year career as an archivist.  Cecelia’s story changed how I viewed my own work.  Processing the separation notices was no longer a filing project.  Each record had its own story and each could have its own Cecelia looking for answers.  For the remainder of the project, I kept the yellow piece of paper with Cecil Graham’s information taped to the wall to remind me of Cecelia and the emotional impact one record can have.

The Virginia World War II Separation Notices contain privacy-protected information such as such as social security numbers and medical information.  Access to the collection is limited to veterans and their next-of-kin.  For more information on the Library’s wealth of resources on Virginia’s wartime experience, please see the November 2010 issue of the Library of Virginia’s e-newsletter.

-Roger Christman, Senior State Records Archivist

John Salling of Slant, Virginia, in Scott County, was long recognized as Virginia’s last surviving Confederate veteran.  In recognition of his service, the state of Virginia issued him a pension from 1933 until his death in 1959, at which time Salling claimed to be 112 years old. Doubt was first cast on Salling’s credibility upon his application for a state pension. When Pension Clerk John H. Johnson was unable to find evidence of Salling’s war record at the Virginia State Library (now the Library of Virginia) which maintained the records of the Department of Confederate Military Records, he required Salling to provide a sworn statement of his service to the Pension Office. Salling submitted an affidavit before a notary public of Scott County certifying that he enlisted in Company D, 25th Virginia Regiment, under Capt. James R. Collins. Salling also stated that he was detailed throughout the war to work in the saltpeter mines in the Dekalb District of Scott County. Salling’s application was approved in April 1933 and he received a monthly pension of twenty-one dollars. In his February 1991 article “The Great Imposters” in Blue and Gray Magazine, Civil War historian William Marvel invalidates John Salling’s claim using census records which place his birth in 1858, not 1846 as Salling long maintained.  Additionally, Life Magazine ran an article in 1953 featuring Salling and other aged Confederate veterans.  The magazine’s online archive states that many supposed veterans misrepresented their age or military service in order to qualify for pensions issued by several Southern states, especially during the Great Depression when Salling first applied.

The Library of Virginia houses Salling’s initial pension application from 1933 which can be viewed on the Library’s Web site along with those of thousands of other Confederate veterans and widows on the Confederate pension rolls (Confederate Pension Rolls). In addition, a recently processed collection from the Department of Accounts Confederate Pension Records (Accession 44105) documents annual pension certificates and pension payroll cards for Salling and his fellow pensioners. This latter collection also documents pensions to maiden or widowed daughters of Confederate veterans, a resource not available on the online pension rolls.

Although the Confederate Pension Rolls and recently processed Confederate Pension Records neither confirm nor deny Salling’s claim, in the eyes of the Commonwealth of Virginia, he was, in fact, who he said he was.  On 15 May 1961, a memorial marker was dedicated in memory of John Salling in Slant, Virginia, as “Virginia’s Last Confederate Veteran.”

-Craig Moore, State Records Appraisal Archivist

One such example exists in the Henkel Family Business Records (Acc. 28040), a collection of 137 volumes related to the family’s general store, farm, and mill businesses in New Market, Virginia. While processing the collection, I came across an L.P. Henkel and Brothers account book, 1869–1872, containing business receipts pasted over handwritten text.

The Library of Virginia’s conservation lab removed each receipt, conserving both the receipts and the ledger pages beneath. This process uncovered a Civil War-era register, 1863–1865, listing conscripts from the 10th Virginia Congressional District (Clarke, Fairfax, Fauquier, Frederick, Loudoun, Prince William, and Warren Counties), with entries for name, age, occupation, physical description, date and place of enrollment, and company assigned. Also included were special orders regarding enlistment and assignments written from headquarters in New Market and Winchester, Virginia. Thanks to careful conservation, these formerly inaccessible records may help researchers uncover more about their own ancestors’ stories.

The original account book and receipts remain with the Henkel Family Business Records. The register portion was microfilmed and cataloged individually (Acc. 43957, Miscellaneous Reel 5495). All are open for research.

–Renee Savits, LVA Private Papers Program Manager