Anyone can volunteer for the Revolutionary War Pension Project.

In 1777, drunken British soldiers stormed into Sarah Martin’s home in Woodbridge, New Jersey and demanded that she cook them ham and eggs. Hostile and impatient, the soldiers threatened to kill her youngest child, who cried as she prepared the meal. One of the officers even wielded his sword, striking the child and giving Martin a severe cut across the arm.

This appalling scene was not a unique event in Martin’s life. The family’s roadside residence, then in British-occupied territory, was ransacked as many as 30 times during the Revolutionary War. British soldiers plundered the home, drove away cattle, and eventually burned down the property while her husband, Gershom Martin, was away for months at a time on militia duty.

Martin recalled these traumatic events 60 years later in a court of record. The 83-year-old widow had to provide oral testimony about her husband’s military service to demonstrate her eligibility for a pension. Today, her story is one of more than 80,000 that would remain untold if not for the Revolutionary War Pension Project.

The Revolutionary War Pension Project is a collaborative effort between the National Park Service and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to transcribe more than 2.3 million pages of pension files from the nation’s first veterans and their widows. Launched in June 2023, the citizen archivist mission provides volunteers with the opportunity to make a permanent contribution to the historical record as the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches.

A Treasure Trove of Stories

Many of the soldiers who survived the American Revolution were left in poor health. In the decades that followed, they often struggled to work and support their families. The young United States addressed this burgeoning crisis of poverty among Revolutionary War veterans by passing the first of four pension acts in 1818. The youngest veterans were in their late 50s and 60s at that point, burdened by 35 years of economic hardship after the war ended in 1783. Several of them owned little but the clothing on their backs and were in desperate need of financial assistance.

At first, pensions were only available for Continental Army soldiers who served under George Washington. Later acts opened pensions to those who served in militias and to widows, like Sarah Martin, married before the war’s end. Since there was little documentation to support the eligibility of widows and militiamen, these applicants had to describe their wartime experiences in a court of record and verify the details with credible witnesses. For a lot of them, especially for those who couldn’t write, it may have felt like the only chance to document their stories. The testimonies of women and people of color fill important gaps in the historical record and reveal the diversity of people who contributed to the war effort.

In the 1970s, NARA created thousands of microfilm reels with photographs of Revolutionary War pension documents held in the National Archives building in Washington, DC. The content of these reels was later digitized for NARA’s online catalog. The collection contains both handwritten pages and later-typed correspondence about the pensions with quality ranging from intact and easy to read to torn, covered in inkblots, and illegible.

National Archives and Records Administration

The pension applications hold detailed and diverse first-hand accounts of the Revolutionary War, from boasts of celebrity encounters with the likes of Washington and the French commander Lafayette to somber accounts of burying the dead after a battle. They chronicle Revolutionary War turning points, many of which are commemorated at present-day NPS sites, such as the 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill and the 1777 Battles of Saratoga. The files also contain valuable social history details about veterans and their families, such as rank, dates of birth, family composition, and property ownership. Each document yet to be transcribed remains an untold story of the revolution.

To date, more than 4,000 Revolutionary War Pension Project volunteers have typed up the content of over 80,000 pages of pension files, with upwards of 2,300 records completely transcribed. Almost 600 contributors are from the NPS.

You can read more in an article by Nina Foster, a 2024 Scientists in Parks intern at Acadia National Park, at: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/revolutionary-war-pensions.htm.