Aging of Veterans of the Union Army: Military, Pension, and Medical Records, 1820-1940 (ICPSR 6837)

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This data collection constitutes a portion of the historical data collected by the project "Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease, and Death." With the goal of constructing datasets suitable for longitudinal analyses of factors affecting the aging process, the project is collecting military, medical, and socioeconomical data on a sample of white males mustered into the Union Army during the Civil War. The project seeks to examine the influence of environmental and host factors prior to recruitment on the health performance and survival of recruits during military service, to identify and show relationships between socioeconomic and biomedical conditions (including nutritional status) of veterans at early ages and mortality rates from diseases at middle and late ages, and to study the effects of health and pensions on labor force participation rates of veterans at ages 65 and over. This installment of the collection, Version M-5, supersedes any previous version of these data. Collected in this version are data from military service, pension, and medical records of veterans who were originally mustered into the Union Army in California, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wisconsin regiments. Also included are data from a 20-company pilot sample and information on recruits whose pension records were stored at the Veterans Administration (VA) Archives in Washington, DC, but had not been collected previously. Data include date and place of birth, place of residence, marital status, number of children, occupation, wealth and income, muster place and date, length of service, battles fought, medical experiences (e.g., illness, wounds, and hospital stays), health status, pension information, and date, place, and cause of death. Additional variables provide the place and date of birth of the recruits' wives, children, and parents. The data are organized into three sections according to state of enlistment. Section 1 (Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4) contains data from New England, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, Iowa, New Jersey, Indiana, Wisconsin, California, New Mexico, and the 20-company pilot sample. Section 2 (Parts 5, 6, 7, and 8) contains data from New York, Michigan, Washington, DC, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and West Virginia, along with pensions data from the VA Archives. Section 3 (Parts 9, 10, 11, and 12) contains data from Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. The variables in Part 13, Linkage Data, indicate which major document sources were located for each recruit. Also, provided is information regarding death dates (Part 14) for individuals whose death records came from the pension payout cards. Approximate date of death was determined by examining the last record of payment to the pensioner.

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To preserve respondent privacy, certain identifying variables are restricted from general dissemination. Aggregations of this information for statistical purposes that preserve the anonymity of individual respondents can be obtained from ICPSR in accordance with existing servicing policies.

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