Û Pensioners on the Rolls 1883

Pensioners on the Rolls, January 1, 1883, Jones County, Iowa

On December 8, 1882, the United States Senate passed a resolution requiring an enumeration of persons collecting military pensions from the Federal government.

The resultant document, while not nearly so large as a census, was still massive. It was subdivided by state, and by county within each state. Within each county were listed the number of the certificate granting the pension, the names of each person receiving a pension as of January 1, 1883, the Post Office through which the pension payment was received, a highly abbreviated description of the reason for which the pension was approved, the amount of the monthly payment, and the date the first payment was made to the specific pensioner. In each county, entries were grouped by Post Office (in alphabetic order). The names of pensioners at each Post Office were listed in no discernable order.

The information presented below is contained in Volume III, which is devoted entirely to Iowa. Larry Kinyon has independently transcribed all 4 volumes of the Pensioners on the Roll, January 1, 1883. In the course of his mammoth transcription, he compiled a brief but helpful list of the commonest abbreviations encountered in the "Cause for which pensioned" column.

The tables below list Jones county pensioners alphabetically, for each Post Office. The original listing contained a multitude of "do" entries, an equivalent at the time to modern ditto-marks. These have been expanded into their referents to facilitate reorganization of the list. With the data grouped into individual tables by Post Office, the column identifying "Post-office address" was omitted from the tabulations as redundant. The rightmost column is not a feature of the original list. It identifies the number of the entry in the order of original listing for the county (which was alphabetized only by Post Office).