Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter Vol 5 No. 29 15 Jul 2000 Civil War Pension Index Cards Available Online One of the more valuable sources of United States genealogy information is the collection of American Civil War pension index cards. If your ancestor fought for the Union and lived through the war, he probably applied for a pension in his later years. If he died during the war, his widow or his children may have applied for his pension. The index cards can show you a synopsis of the information recorded during the application. The applications by widows or children can be especially valuable, as the applicants had to prove their relationship. Once you have the information from the index card, you can order copies of the veteran's military records as well as their pension records directly from the National Archives in Washington, DC. There is more information contained on the pension papers that is useful for genealogy than the information that you will find contained in the military records. However, the military records will often contain a physical description of the soldier, and in some cases they also contained discharge papers. MyFamily.com has now added the actual images of the index cards to their Ancestry.com Web site. This is a huge database. I don't know how many megabytes or gigabytes this database occupies on Ancestry's Web server, but it must be huge. Here is the announcement from MyFamily.com: Ancestry.com(SM), part of MyFamily.com, Inc., the leading online family network, today (July 13) announced that American Civil War pension index cards are now available for viewing and printing at Ancestry.com. Of great value to family historians and genealogists, the online images provide extensive detail only available through original source records. The Civil War pension cards are the first of numerous records that will be available through the Images Online service on the Ancestry.com site. Upcoming Images Online databases include the U.S. federal census schedules from 1790 to 1920, the first of which will be available later this summer. "By offering Images Online, Ancestry.com is taking online genealogy to a new level. Making these documents available online allows our users to view and print documents that have traditionally been stored on microfilm and are difficult to access," said Andre Brummer, general manager of Ancestry.com. "Not only is this information extremely valuable, but as we begin to make more and more images of this kind available online, we are saving people a great deal of time and money that would have been spent in the search for these records." The Civil War Images Online will be free for all users to access until July 21, 2000. Following the initial free trial, the pension index cards images will be viewable and printable online only in the Ancestry.com subscription area. More than 2.5 million images of pension index cards have been added to Ancestry.com, each recording the veteran's name and the state in which the application was received. If a widow or a child filed the application, that individual's name and relevant information is included. Until now, the pension index cards were only available through microfilm copies contained at the National Archives and limited repositories. Online images of the Civil War pension index cards will be added to other in-depth Civil War databases on Ancestry.com. Other Civil War databases on the site include the Civil War Research Database, American Civil War Muster Rolls, Kansas Civil War Soldiers, Maryland Soldiers in the Civil War, Minnesota Civil War Soldiers, Missouri Civil War Records, Nevada Civil War Volunteers, Tennessee Civil War Regimental Histories, and many more. About MyFamily.com, Inc. MyFamily.com, Inc. is the leading online network for families. The company's four Internet sites, MyFamily.com, Ancestry.com, FamilyHistory.com and RootsWeb.com, according to Media Metrix are among the 10 fastest growing sites and rank among the top 20 in total pageviews according to Nielsen/NetRatings. MyFamily.com is the leading provider of free, private Web sites for families, where family members can share photos and news, participate in private voice and text chats, and maintain a calendar of family events. Ancestry.com is the premier online resource for tracing family history, where visitors can discover their roots by searching more than 600 million names. FamilyHistory.com hosts more than 100,000 free family history oriented message boards that allow users to connect and share information with others who are researching similar family lines. RootsWeb.com is the oldest and largest free community genealogy site. Privately held, MyFamily.com, Inc. has offices in San Francisco, New York City and Provo, Utah. Investors in MyFamily.com, Inc. include CMGI @Ventures (Nasdaq: CMGI), Eastman Kodak, America Online, Inc. (NYSE: AOL), Compaq Computer Corporation, Tango, Intel Capital, Group Arnault, Pivotal Asset Management LLC and Amerindo Investment Advisors, Inc. For more information, visit http://www.myfamilyinc.com/pressroom.