Civil War Veterans Series

collection: series

About this Collection

The Civil War Veterans Series is a historical project which was developed under the direction of Robert W. Fogel with data collected on the veterans of the Union Army in the period 1820-1940 by the Department of Economics at Brigham Young University and processed by the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago.

The project was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The goal of the project was to construct datasets suitable for longitudinal analyses of factors affecting the aging process. Lifetime military, medical, and socioeconomic data linked to other historical documents on a sample of white males mustered into the Union Army during the Civil War are used to: examine the influence of environmental and host factors prior to recruitment on the health performance and survival of recruits during military service, 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 study the effects of health and pensions on labor force participation rates of veterans at ages 65 and over.

There are three principal collections in this project:

  • The largest, the "Military, Pension, and Medical Records (study 6837)," collected from military-related documents at the National Archives in Washington, DC, include both war-time records and applications made by veterans for pension support, and related detailed physical examinations completed by physicians, certifying the veterans' health and disability status.
  • Information from these examinations was collected in the second major dataset, the "Surgeon's Certificates (study 2877)."
  • The third major dataset, the "Census Records (study 6836)," contains information that is available in the U.S. Federal Censuses of 1850, 1860, 1900, and 1910, though not all veterans could be successfully linked to the Census documents. However, all individuals in the series can be linked across datasets by means of a unique identification number.

This series transitioned into the Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease and Death Project, also known as the Union Army Data, led by Dora L. Costa and funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA). The project was first funded by the National Institute on Aging through a grant to the National Bureau of Economic Research in 1992.

The Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease and Death project specializes in the development of longitudinal life-cycle and historical environmental data sets to study economic, demographic, and epidemiological processes. These data are used to study life-cycle and intergenerational factors in the secular decline in morbidity and mortality, improvements in the standard of living over time, changing patterns in geographic mobility, and changing patterns in the intergenerational transmission of wealth.

Studies

5 results

Aging of Veterans of the Union Army: Surgeons' Certificates, United States, 1862-1940

This data collection, Aging of Veterans of the Union Army: Surgeons' Certificates, United States, 1862-1940, 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 collects military, medical, and socioeconomic data on a sample of white males mustered into the Union Army during the Civil War. The surgeons' certificates contain information from examining physicians to determine eligibility for pension benefits. Also included are questions regarding the age, occupation, residence, and military experience of the veterans. These data can be linked to "Aging of Veterans of the Union Army: Military, Pension, and Medical Records, 1820-1940" (ICPSR 6837) and "Aging of Veterans of the Union Army: United States Federal Census Records, 1850, 1860, 1900, 1910" (ICPSR 6836) using the variable "recidnum."

Historical Urban Ecological Data, 1830-1930

The Historical Urban Ecological (HUE) data project was created for exploring and analyzing the urban health environments of seven major United States cities - Baltimore, Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Cincinnati, Manhattan, and Philidelphia - from 1830 through 1930. The data for each city includes ward boundary changes, street networks, and ward-level data on disease, mortality, crime, and other variables reported by municipal departments. The HUE data set was produced for the "Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease and Death" project, funded by the National Institute of Aging. This collection represents the GIS data for each of the seven American cities, and in addition to ward boundary changes and street networks, includes in-street sewer and water sanitation systems coverage. All cities except Cincinnati include sanitation infrastructure data, and for Baltimore only water infrastructure is available. The city of Chicago includes supplemental GIS layers which reflect a reconstruction of two of Homer Hoyt's maps of average land value (1933 dollars) in the City of Chicago for 1873 and 1892. The square mile areas defined by Hoyt using Chicago's system of mile streets have been fit to the HUE street centerlines for Chicago. The Excel data tables include information about deaths in each ward broken down by cause of death, age, race, gender, as well as information about live births and deliveries.

Aging of Veterans of the Union Army: United States Federal Census Records, 1850, 1860, 1900, 1910

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 C-3, supersedes all previous collections (Versions C-1 and C-2), and contains data from the censuses of 1850, 1860, 1900, and 1910 on veterans who were originally mustered into the Union Army in Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and West Virginia. This version of the collection also contains observations from Wisconsin, Indiana, California, and New Mexico. Census Data, Part 1, includes place of residence, relationship to head of household, date and place of birth, number of children, education, disability status, employment status, number of years in the United States, literacy, marital status, occupation, parents' birthplace, and property/home ownership. The variables in Part 2, Linkage Data, indicate which document sources were located for each recruit.
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