Wilmot Thayer Vickery, Union Soldier

My current grand overall genealogical focus is the family and descendants of Jonathan and Ruhamah (Gould) Vickery of Glenburn, Maine, my 3x great-grandparents on my dad's side of the family.  I am working my way through the names and dates, looking at ways to add more substance to the narrative.  One in this family that I have become a little fixated on in is my great granduncle Wilmot Thayer Vickery (in fact, his framed photo now hangs in my home office).  So I'm tackling a little research on the Civil War itself, the regiment that he served in, and the life he left at home.

Declaration for an Original Pension 

of a Father or Mother

I have long extolled the genealogical value that can be discovered within a Civil War Pension File.  In fact, I have done presentations on this very subject. And yes, I was excited to see that there was a pension request filed by my great-great-grandmother, Betsey (Gibbs) Vickery, in 1886 as the mother of Wilmot Thayer Vickery. So I hired a professional genealogist to obtain a copy of it for me from the National Archives. Over the next few weeks, I plan on sharing some of the treasures that are contained in that pension request - from numerous affidavits to copies of letters that Wilmot wrote home to his parents.  It promises to be an interesting journey, and give a great glimpse into why I love Civil War pension files.

First, a little background on Wilmot himself.  He was the fourth of nine children born to Stephen Thayer and Betsey (Gibbs) Vickery. He was born on 25 Sep 1843 in Glenburn, Maine.  It seems he was the son destined to stay on the home farm, helping his father, and in all probability taking over the farm upon his father's death.  However, fate had a different path.  He enlisted to fight in the Civil War as a private, working his way to 2nd Lieutenant of Company L, First Maine Heavy Artillery.  He was mortally wounded in the Battle of Spottsylvania on 19 May 1864, a gunshot wound to the head.  He died on 26 May 1864 in the Emory Hospital in Washington, D.C.  His body was brought back to Maine and buried in the Vickery Family Plot in Lakeview Cemetery, Glenburn, Maine.

1886 being the year the pension request was filed is significant.  Stephen Thayer Vickery died on 30 November of that and he had been in poor health for some time.  Betsey, looking at approaching widowhood, was taking steps to find a way to receive funds to help her live on.  Much of the pension paperwork revolves around the issue of whether Wilmot Vickery was supporting his family before and during his service, and that his loss caused financial hardship for the family.  In fact, one piece of correspondence to the Pension Office put forth an opinion that the request was a scam.  There was a Special Investigation, which may not have been good for Betsey at the time, but of great benefit to us many years later, the most important being that copies of the letters home from Wilmot are submitted as evidence that he was sending money back home, but they contain so much other insights beyond that fact.  They are just fun to read as well.

So we'll look at this together as I work my way through transcribing all the documents.  What I have read thus far has already created a few fractures in what I had always envisioned, that the family was well-to-do and successful. Sometimes we learn the truth is perhaps different, or perhaps it's a matter of perspective.