My friends - I had intended to have this posted yesterday evening, but other business intervened and prevented my doing so. You will recall that our problem was centered around trying to determine which, if any, of a group of different years was the correct one for the death of Josephus Snurd. There were 12 folks who sent me their thoughts on this one, and all were headed in the right direction and about two-thirds "nailed" it. The researcher who was trying to establish the exact date of death for Josephus(who was her great-grandfather) had exhausted every approach to determining whether old Josephus had died in 1896, 1897, or 1898 - except one, which she missed, and which she should not have missed, because she knew the records were there. It was well known in the family that there was a child born not long after the death of Josephus, but which only survived for about three months. The child died, and thus had to be buried, and a burial record was created. We knew that such records existed in this case, because the researcher had tried to use them to determine the year of death for Josephus, but the final digit was missing in that record, and the grave marker was not legible enough to determine if it read 1896 or 1898. However, the infant child died in August of 1896, and was therefore born probably in May of 1896, which gives us the year for the death of Josephus, which is also 1896. Several people wanted to know why the widow waited so many years to apply for a widow's pension. I asked the same question, just as a matter of curiosity. It appears that the widow lived with her children for many years, until she became too infirm to remain at home. She went to live in an "Old Folks Home", as they used to be termed. When the staff at the home found that she was the widow of a Civil War vet, they insisted that she apply for the pension, so that they could appropriate all or part of it. However, the widow's daughter filled out the application for her mother, whose memory was almost gone, and the date for the death of the vet was wrong. Ironically, the pension was rejected, as she had not been married to the vet at the time he was in service, and mention was made in the rejection letter of an earlier attempt by this widow to apply for the same pension(which was also rejected), but no documents associated with the earlier application were ever found. This was a situation in which the researcher had about reached the point of not being able to see the forest for the trees, and sometimes we all get to that point. At such times, an "outsider" can occasionally see something somewhat obvious that we may have missed. -B ============================================================