Heirloom Cookbooks

A collection of family recipes are a great gift for Christmas. If you have recipes collected from your mother, grandmother, or passed down from ancestors and they are just loose copies kept in cookbooks or a recipe box, then an heirloom cookbook is a great idea to preserve and pass these recipes on to your children and grandchildren.

Holidays are a fun time for family gatherings and home-cooked meals. It would be great to include recipes from these occasions that bring back fond memories. Adding memories, pictures, and even a short history of the ancestor along with the recipes makes this a special book to be treasured. You can also include special Sunday dinners that the family enjoyed on Sundays. Some recipes may have been used for generations, and these give children and grandchildren a chance to share in these delicious memories that have been a part of their family for generations. Heirloom cookbooks are a great way to share your family history with your family.

You can even include favorite recipes of each of your children or grandchildren and start traditions of passing down a new generation of memories. These recipes could consist of favorite birthday foods that include cake recipes. You can organize your cookbook by a family member, holiday, or even favorite family reunion recipes and memories. Don’t forget to add pictures!

You can create these cookbooks simple by gathering the recipes and putting them in a binder, or you can get creative and use a publishing company to print your book. If you have good copies of the recipes, include a scanned copy of the recipe instead of rewriting it, especially if they are handwritten.

A search on Pinterest.com with the term “heirloom cookbook diy” will give you lots of ideas on how to create your heirloom cookbook. There are ideas for templates and lots of pictures of cookbooks that others have created. There are great visuals on how to include photos and histories along with the recipes. Not sure on how you want the cover of your cookbook to look like? There are lots of ideas on Pinterest too.

Making a family cookbook full of your family’s favorite meals is a great gift and a perfect way to pass down your heritage. You can put these recipes into binders or use websites like Sanpfish.com and Blurb.com that have cookbook templates to create your special gift.

Civil War Widow’s Pensions

If your ancestor was born between 1801-1849 in the U.S., there is a good chance that they served in the Civil War. Pensions were granted to widows and those dependent upon the soldier that served in the Union Army. For Union soldiers, the pension system began in 1862, (Confederate veterans were not eligible for pensions from the federal government, and their home states had to take care of them). More than a million men were on the pension rolls by 1893. These pension records include information that may help you extend your family lines and understand what the war was like for these ancestors.

These pension records may include the soldier’s full name, name of widow or dependent, rank, company, regiment, infantry unit, when and where the soldier enlisted, amount of pension, death date, and cause of death. This information may lead to death certificates and burial records. The resident of the dependent can lead to census, church, and land records.

Unfortunately, Fold3.com has only been able to digitize 21% of the pension files. The files are very fragile, and digitizing was halted until the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) felt assured that these records would not incur damage during scanning. Fold3.com has the digitized pension records and is available at the FamilySearch Center. There is a Civil War Pension Index available on FamilySearch and Ancestry. If you locate your ancestor in the index and their file has not been digitized, you can go to the nara.gov website and request a copy of the files referenced in the index.

I did find an uncle (John F. Swap) whose mother applied for a pension and luckily this pension was digitized. I discovered that John was the sole provider for his mother as his father had died when he was young, and she was able to receive a pension. He enlisted in 1863 in Norwich, Connecticut and died the 3rd of February 1865 of starvation, exposure, and diarrhea at the Salisbury, North Carolina prison camp. Information found in his 36-page pension file include handwritten letters from his mother and uncles. There is a handwritten letter from his Sargent who was present when John died.

The information I found in John’s pension file, along with the handwritten letters, has helped me to put “meat on the bones” of my ancestor, John F. Swap. Hopefully, you will find such a treasure too.

The “Forgotten War”

The War of 1812, also known as the Second Revolutionary War, produced many records that are valuable to genealogists. It is also known as the “Forgotten War” because it is not studied much at school and is all but unknown. Unfortunately, the War of 1812 pension records has been at the bottom of the stack to be digitized. These pension records have 7.2 million pages contained in 180,000 files (www.preservethepensions.org)

In 2008, the National Archives approached the FGS (Federation of Genealogical Societies) to save these vital records. These frequently requested pension records are not microfilmed and are in bad shape because they are deteriorating from age. The FGS bided out the digitizing process, and Fold3.com won the bid. The FGS also needed $3 million to pay for this project, and more than 4,000 individuals and 115 genealogical societies contributed the amount required to do this preservation. They have digitized A – P of surnames in this project so far. They are free on Fold3.com and will remain that way indefinitely!

If you have an ancestor born between 1752 – 1799, they may have served in the War of 1812. Statistics show that there were 60,000 members of the U.S. Army and 475,000 state militias or volunteers that served. Your ancestor may not have been in the war but wrote out an affidavit to help support a claim. (www.familysearch.org/blog/en/war-1812-pension-files/)

To find these records, you need to go to fold3.com – browse military records by war- War of 1812- War of 1812 Pension Files – browse- choose state ancestor lived in – choose the letter of the last name. I went to New Hampshire – Johnson – Jeremiah (my 2nd Great Grandfather). There are 64 pages of documents in his file. You can save these records to your tree at ancestry.com. I found a marriage certificate, my 2nd Grandmother’s signature, a document written by Jeremiah’s sister about his first wife’s death, a description of Jeremiah (6ft tall, black hair, black eyes, dark complexion). There were letters written by family members verifying that he existed and served in the war. To me, this was a treasure trove.

Check out the War of 1812 pension records and see if treasures are waiting for you there! I had no idea that Jeremiah had served in the War of 1812 and he only did so for a few months. I am so glad I checked out these records. Don’t forget the “Forgotten War!”