June 13, 1999 Dear Group: I would like to help the website members help yourselves by asking someone to volunteer to type up and put on the website or some other commonly available free site, the lists of Horry County Confederate Pension recipients. I am a hunt-and-peck typer and basically computer illiterate so I will make the lists available to anyone that will agree to promptly do the job. The lists are typeset so they are easy to read. After having gone through a great deal of grief and major expense at the hands of the SC Dept of Archives and History, I have finally managed to assemble all of theirpayments rosters of Horry County Confederate Veterans or their wives that received pensions. The years of coverage are sporatic but start in 1898 and run through the 1923 rolls. If you think that any of your ancestors may have had Confederate military experience, and most of the able bodied men did, then this list is an all important reference document that must be used to demonstrate to the folks at the archives that your ancestors did serve and did receive a pension. I found out the hard way that, unless you can prove to them by using the State Assembly/Comptrollers disbursement list, they will not really bother to go through the jumble of pension documents, 11 c.f. to find your ancestor's docs, that the Horry Probate Judge's Office sent to them in 1998. There are many vets cited as having received pension funds that are not listed anywhere else and just about every surname query that I see on this site is represented. These lists and the resulting pension application docs and Honor Roll Commitee Minutes are a wealth of genealogical information; however, before the archives will not move off their behinds and sort, organize, and index these precious documents, there has to be enough demand generated for the pension records, and hence pressure brought to bear to go ahead and properly make them available for our reference purposes. As the situation stands now you have to go to Columbia and dig through 11 c.f. of material or pay a researcher at least $25 per hour and up to do it for you, which I feel is an outrage. I think that it would take a good typist about 4 hours max to do the job. Please let me hear from a willing volunteer and I willsee that you get the lists. Unfortunately, I am not able to respond to individual queries re. the lists. Sincerely Yours-----Julian R. Harper