My name is Jason Wickersty and this is my work.
This project began nearly 15 years ago, when I started transcribing Revolutionary War veteran pension declarations with the goal, at the time, of finding new soldiers’ narratives of the Battle of Monmouth. To the dismay of my carpal tunnels, it soon expanded to transcribing the declarations of and associated demographic information for every digitized pension file associated with the State of New Jersey under M804 - Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty-Land Warrant Application Files. Over the course of that time, I received no outside funding or institutional support. This project is purely a product of my own personal toil and sacrifice.
This project to map New Jersey’s Revolutionary veterans and their widows builds upon the work of historians Dr. Theodore J. Crackel and
Dr. Mark Edward Lender, and was inspired by the Tennessee State Library & Archives Patriot Paths mapping project.
In September 1981, Theodore J. Crackel, then a professor of history at the United States Military Academy, published Longitudinal Migration in America, 1780–1840: A Study of Revolutionary War Pension Records, which introduced the concept of using Revolutionary War pension files as a source for historical migration data. Three years later, he followed up with Revolutionary War Pension Records and Patterns of American Mobility, 1780–1830, which focused his study of pensioner migration patterns to a sample of 1,400 New Jersey veterans. However, as Crackel himself noted, his findings were only preliminary. Crackel did not separate pensioners out by cohort (those who applied under the 1818 law, and those who applied under the 1832 law), nor were the migrations mapped. This study fills those gaps in Crackel’s work by mapping the migration of New Jersery’s Revolutionary veterans using geospatial data derived from Revolutionary veteran and widow pension declrations, visualized using Esri’s arcGIS.
This project also continues the work from Mark Edward Lender groundbreaking 1975 dissertation “The Enlisted Line: The Continental Soldiers of New Jersey.” Using the descriptive rolls of men drafted for nine months of service in General William Maxwell’s New Jersey Brigade, just before the Battle of Monmouth in 1778, Lender explored the ages, origins, and socio-economic background of soldiers. My study widens the scope to a larger number of individuals, and to a period later in life when these soldiers were middle-aged veterans with families, and in many cases, living far from the scenes of their service.
The Tennessee State Library & Archives Patriot Paths mapping project was revelatory to me in its use of Esri’s arcGIS software as a data visualisation tool to map the migrations of Revolutionary veterans. Suzanne White, of the TNMap Team, Special Projects and Training under the Strategic Technology Solutions division of the State of Tennessee, was kind enough to answer my questions, and offered me invaluable insights into the development of the Patriot Paths project. I am deeply indebted to her for her assistance.
