Claim is here.
That is interesting. I knew that there were grandchildren of Civil War soldiers still alive (my own grandfather and his sisters are among those) but I didn’t think that there were any children of Civil War veterans left. However, it turns out there are still a surprising number of them. There were about 35 known as of 2014. I suspect the number is lower today because they are all very old.
IIRC, the last Civil War widow only died about 10 years ago. Apparently it wasn’t too uncommon in the 1910’s and 20’s for young women to enter into mostly platonic marriages with old veterans with pensions. I suppose if there really are still children left, they weren’t all platonic though!
There are several sources for the story of Mose Triplett, who began the War fighting for the Confederacy, and ended it fighting for the Union, having contrived to switch sides sometime in 1864. The Veterans Administration pension in question derives from his Union service. (There were Confederate pensions paid for many years, but those came from the respective states. Triplett’s wife and children probably didn’t get one of those.)
My grandmother, who died in 2012, was the grandchild of a Civil War soldier, who was interned at Andersonville.
Updating this thread:
From the OP’s source:
We she has since died at age 90–and at the end was still collecting the same miserly $73.13 pension each month.
I heard this on a podcast some time ago. I’m wondering if someone lost their job when the lady died, because the Department of Paying Civil War Pensions probably no longer exists. Seriously, though, I wonder how this is managed in the government? If it were a private company, they would have simply tried to buy her out.
Dupe.
You laugh but that was big money in '65 terms. At least the 10th President of the U.S. grandsons are still alive. I think “generation jumping” as I call it is quite fascinating. My own great-grandmother was born in 1883 and I knew her quite well as a child. She knew a few people from the 1700’s and I am not even very old. Second hand knowledge can go a surprisingly long way. It wasn’t until the 2000’s that, not one, but two widows of Civil War soldiers died. My great-great grandfather was an actual Civil War soldier and didn’t die until 1948 and my currently still living grandfather knew him all the way into adulthood.
I’m not sure how it is managed either, but I don’t see why there would be a need to have a different pension department for every war. Why couldn’t they just have a War Pension department and when this lady dies, she is taken off the pension rolls just like if an Afghan War widow died in a car accident?
I want to know who came up with this pension scheme. I am all for supporting our veterans, but even if we assume he was in the Army from Ft. Sumter to Appomattox, how does one justify 155 years worth of pension payments for 4 years of service?
Yeah I realize it is only $70 per month, but you get a lot of metoo-ism going on. A lot of people could very much use an extra $70/month but this lady got it simply because her father served in a war 155 years ago?
Is this normal? My father was a son of a WWII vet and he never got a pension. As I type this, I’m thinking that my grandfather never got a pension at all. Is this something the government enacted a long time ago and then some smart guy realized that the scheme would put the government on the hook for a century and a half so it was reformed for latter wars?
She was institutionalized for most of her life.
And in a step I probably should have taken first:
It seems that as a disabled adult child of a veteran, this qualified her for a pension. The article also states that her father enlisted in the Confederate Army, deserted, and then joined the Union Army. It also says that 16 widows and children from the Spanish American War are still getting pensions!
Obviously, whoever wrote the rules didn’t envision this happening. The rules likely only specified that wife and children would receive the pension with no limits on when they were acquired. Loophole exploited.
somewhat tangentially, I have a friend whose father was a teacher from 1950-1980. He took a pension from 1980 till 2010. THe set up was that he was allowed to assign his pension to his child, my friend. My friend is getting his dads pension for the last 10 years and will likely get it for another 20 before he dies. So for 30 years worth of service, the state is paying another 60 years in pension benefits. These situations tend to take a toll on govt budgets
Agreed. Let’s take our Spanish American war widow. Imagine a man enlisting in 1898 when he was 18 years old and is a Spanish American War Vet. Make him born in 1880.
When he is age 90 in 1970, he marries a woman who is 18 and a child is born one year later in 1971.
A living Spanish American War widow would be only 68 years old today and the child of a Spanish American War veteran would only be 49.
The same assumptions for a World War I vet means that a widow could be 48 and a child 29.