Post by ifam13 on Jul 15, 2017 4:33:01 GMT
Good afternoon
I posted this on the Facebook board today and thought that this would be a good topic to get our message board forum started with. Finding your Revolutionary War Ancestors can be challenging. Today I found a document from the National Archives showing a relative in 1959 looking for their Revolutionary War ancestor.
This relative has already done have the research for you. If you click on the document attached you will see that he identifies where his ancestor was living before the Revolution and he also identifies that his ancestor was a private in Colonel William Nelson's Regiment in New Jersey. Even though the government writes back informing the relative that he did not serve long enough to get a pension does not mean the relative did not serve. In fact this type of thing happened a lot in the Revolution. Some patriots waited awhile before they took up arms against the British hoping things would work themselves out. Other colonists were still on the fence or were living with loyalists. So this document also asks the question: What took so long for this person to join ? Why was he in and out of battles for only a year or two? The interesting thing about the Revolution is that it was a seven year war which is a long time to be fighting. So there are a lot of things that you can take away from this document to get a better idea of what your patriot ancestors may have been going through.
I posted this on the Facebook board today and thought that this would be a good topic to get our message board forum started with. Finding your Revolutionary War Ancestors can be challenging. Today I found a document from the National Archives showing a relative in 1959 looking for their Revolutionary War ancestor.
This relative has already done have the research for you. If you click on the document attached you will see that he identifies where his ancestor was living before the Revolution and he also identifies that his ancestor was a private in Colonel William Nelson's Regiment in New Jersey. Even though the government writes back informing the relative that he did not serve long enough to get a pension does not mean the relative did not serve. In fact this type of thing happened a lot in the Revolution. Some patriots waited awhile before they took up arms against the British hoping things would work themselves out. Other colonists were still on the fence or were living with loyalists. So this document also asks the question: What took so long for this person to join ? Why was he in and out of battles for only a year or two? The interesting thing about the Revolution is that it was a seven year war which is a long time to be fighting. So there are a lot of things that you can take away from this document to get a better idea of what your patriot ancestors may have been going through.
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