Sources - The 1820 Pensioners
The information used to build the dataset behind the Continental veteran migration maps comes from the Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty-Land-Warrant Application Files, NARA Record Group 15, Microfilm Publication 804, held by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. The same set of 690 declarations made by Jersey Continental Line veterans who applied for benefits under the Act of 1818 was used as the base for this visualization. However, the act was amended in 1820 which added new requirements, new paperwork, and new sources of information.
The Government was not at all prepared for the overwhelming number of pension applications that would arrive. It was estimated that, in total, perhaps 2,000 veterans would be alive and eligible for a pension - instead 20,000 declarations were received by the War Department just in the first seven months the Act was in effect. Due to exploding costs and wealthy veterans, including judges and Congressmen, taking advantage of a lax approval process to receive pensions intended the poor and indigent, the Act of 1818 was amended on May 1, 1820 to require a means test. All veterans who were approved under the Act of March 18, 1818 had to return to court to make a new declaration. Not only would they need to once again outline their wartime service, but to also give an inventory of all the property they owned, and indicate whether they had any family and to describe the state of their health and that of their family members.
Geolocating the Veterans
Learning a lesson from the massive influx of pension applications under the Act of 1818, many county courts printed fill-in-the-blank declaration forms to help speed along the reapplication process.
The Act of 1818 outlined what information was necessary for a veteran to apply for a pension. It provided no specific language or formatting, only that the veteran “shall make a declaration, under oath or affirmation, before the district judge of the United States of the district, or before any judge or court of record of the county, state, or territory, in which the applicant shall reside…”
The printed declarations took the same form as the original declarations made under the Act of 1818. All the court clerks had to do was fill in the date, the veteran’s biographical information, his testimony, and property inventory, endorsed by the required signatures.
While not every court opted for the printed forms, many did, and they made the data collection much easier. With the added information from the 1820 declarations, it was now possible to compare locations against each other between the veteran’s first application, and when the reapplied under the Act of 1820. The majority of veterans sought to reapply shortly after the newly amended act was passed on May 1, 1820, but others waited several years. For those veterans who moved between their applications, the latitude and longitude for each location was established and saved in an Excel spreadsheet to be visualized in arcGIS Pro.
Example of the handwritten declaration under the Act of March 18, 1818 for Cornelius Mills (S.35435), and the printed declaration for his reapplication under the Act of May 1, 1820. By the time he reaapplied on July 7, 1823, he and his family of seven was living on “12 acres & 25/100 of land in Hanover in [Morris] County with one dwelling house, built of wood in or about 1783 containing only one room very leaky & much out of repair, no barn or stable the fences poor & land much exhausted & poor.”
