A Soldier's Life

Two records, two halves of a life

Most families have one or the other and don't know the second exists. Read together, they cover the battlefield and the hearth.

A report you can act on

Written for a family reader, not a research audience. Every finding points somewhere you can go next.

• Names, dates and places, pulled out and listedEvery person, residence, occupation and date in the file, set out as leads, each one pointing at a census, a county record, a cemetery.
• What the file establishes, and what it doesn'tIf the record proves his service but not the link to your third generation, we say so and tell you what would.
• Every hard-to-read entry listed honestlyWhere a word can't be read, it's flagged. Nothing is guessed at, and no gap is quietly filled in.
• The law behind each claimA pension that jumps in 1907 usually means the Service and Age Act, not a worsening injury. We tell you which changes are the man and which are the statute.

Read one before you order

Complete reports, start to finish, including the parts where the record wouldn't answer the question. The soldiers are invented so that no real family's file is published, but every document type, tier, flag and citation is exactly what you'd receive.

Why not just run it through AI yourself?

Fair question. So we ran the experiment for you: the same specimen file, the same AI model, twice. Once with the plain question anyone would type, and once through our process. Both results are published below, unedited, and the plain run is genuinely decent. The differences are the point.

• The money that vanishedThe file contains a bounty amount obscured by an ink blot. Our report flags it, by page, and refuses to guess. The plain AI run never mentions the bounty at all. Nothing tells you its summary is incomplete, and that is the whole problem in one line.
• A date quietly decidedThe army recorded one death date; the widow swore to another, because she was told of his death, not there for it. The plain run states the army's date as fact and shrugs the difference off in a closing aside. Our report shows both readings and explains why an honest widow's answer can differ from the record.
• Nothing you can checkThe plain run cites no pages and offers no proof it read every page. Our reports tie every fact to the page that states it, and software refuses to ship a report unless every page in the file is accounted for.

The AI is not the product. The same model produced both documents. What you are paying for is the discipline wrapped around it: the evidentiary rulebook, the mechanical checks, the honest flags, and on the reviewed tier, a person re-reading every flagged entry against the original scans.

What this isn't

What a report costs

You send the file you already have. If you don't have it yet, tell us below and we will provide guidance on obtaining the file.

Every report at these prices is an automated draft. We read it through once before it goes out to catch obvious errors, but we don't check each reading against the original documents, and the report tells you so, every time. A historian-reviewed edition will follow later at a higher price. Join the waitlist and these prices are held for you, whatever they become later.

Who reads your file

Sean Protas

Historian · Author · Sons of Union Veterans

I've read more than two hundred pension files researching the 2nd Delaware Infantry. That's where this came from: enough files to know what these records reliably establish, and what they only appear to.

The hard part was never the handwriting. It's knowing that a pension rate rose in 1907 because Congress changed the law and not because a man's health failed, that an R on a Revolutionary War file doesn't always mean the claim was rejected, and that a widow's sworn account of a marriage forty years earlier is strong evidence of one thing and weak evidence of another. Those distinctions are what you're paying for.

Twenty-five years in the field with a reenacting unit, including a few turns as a soldier on film, and a history degree from the University of Delaware.

My own family lineage runs to Musician Charles H. Minnemeyer of the 11th Pennsylvania Reserves Infantry, the line my Sons of Union Veterans membership is documented on. I've had to prove a lineage myself, out of these same records.

I built the process that produces these reports, and everything about the way it flags uncertainty rather than filling it in comes from knowing what these tools do when nobody constrains them. I'm a historian and researcher, not a board-certified genealogist. That is a real credential, and it is not one I hold. What I bring is documentary: I know these record groups, the acts behind them, and the places where they go quiet.