US still making payments to relatives of Civil War veterans, analysis finds

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Interesting.

I am happy those benefits apply, to some degree.

My dad didn't get those, not even for himself. 14 tours during Nam/Cuba.

My sister didn't get any, even though she never applied, but I don't think they were ever available.

I did know a lady in her 90's during the early 1990's. She worked for a sausage factory. She got lifetime health benefits and retirement. She would send me for her prescriptions, they cost her $1.75 no matter what. She said her doc visits were $5 at the most.

That is the America I falsely believed in. Until Dad needed America. Then there was nothing. Just cost. Nothing he was told to help with health or finances.

Happy some people still have it and can believe, regardless of their mental or physical circumstances.

I thought only the 1950's gave the "Wipe It All Clean" promises. At least these folks actually receive them.

Money - The Illusory God

Hubby's mom didn't get the benefits either until the last year of her life when she found out she qualified. No one told her when her WWII husband died she was entitled and spent 35 or so years missing out on money owed to her! Her SIL found out and informed her and after spending months sending in the documents she received exactly one years additional payment to make up for the decades. Then her regular payments started and she died in a year.

All those decades she worked and scrimped when she didn't have to. :banghead:

 

[STANDREID]

Irene looks like she's in pretty good shape. They might be paying her benefits for another decade or two.

 

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There are 10 living recipients of benefits tied to the 1898 Spanish-American War at a total cost of about $50,000 per year. The Civil War payments are going to two children of veterans — one in North Carolina and one in Tennessee— each for $876 per year............

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/03/20...#ixzz2O8T7hXgl

That can't be right...?
The Civil War ended 1865 so if someone who died in that one had a child the child would be at least 148 years old now. Or do they also include war veterans who died years after the war ended from complications of their wounds and might have got children years after the war?

oh, never mind, I see it includes "to compensate those who have left military service"
I suppose they might have had children several decades afterwards.

Quite a few Civil War veterans married very late in life to very young women. It may have been solely so the women could collect the benefits their husbands had earned with their military service.

Three Civil War widows died in the last ten years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maudie_Hopkins
Alberta Martin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gertrude Janeway - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

My own great great great grandfather remarried after the Civil War - he was 73, she was 28. He had 9 children by his first wife who had died before 1865, and another 5 children by his young wife before he died at the age of 86. All of his second family children were younger than his grandchildren from his first family!

If my great great grandfather had lived, he could have been one of those veterans with a late family - he was 18 when he enlisted. But he died six weeks after his only child was born without ever having seen him. That son took after his grandfather, though - after his first wife died he remarried and had a second family that was a generation younger than his first family.