General Meeting
July 28 @ 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
General Meeting
Time: 7:00 – 8:30 pm ET
Location: First Presbyterian Church, 189 Church Street, Marietta, GA 30060
Topic: Revolutionary War Pensions
Description: Learn how to use them in researching your Revolutionary War ancestors and their associates as well as understanding how memory prevails over time. The talk will cover where to locate the short versions of the pensions as well as the full pension files, including several new locations that have recently appeared. Also, we will cover how you can learn more about your ancestors F/A/N club (Friends, Associates, and Neighbors) by finding pensions related to others in their neighborhood that they may have witnessed or where battles and other activities could be discussed in more details. There are also other types of RevWar materials that exist that are not pensions but that can possibly provide valuable information on your subject and their role during the war. The lecture will also include a bit about the Loyalists Pensions/payments given to the British supporters after they fled to England after the war.
This talk is part of Kenneth Thomas’ Sons of the American Revolution Lectures Series offered for the 250th Anniversary.
Bio: Kenneth H. Thomas, Jr., is a native of Columbus, Georgia and an Emory University graduate. He is an 8th generation Georgian, descending from Hall Hudson who arrived in what is now Burke County, GA, in 1766, and later supported the Patriot Cause in the 1770s. Ken wrote the weekly genealogy column in the Sunday Atlanta Journal-Constitution for 47 years (1977-2024) until the newspaper dropped the column. He is the co-author with Robert S. Davis, Jr., of Kettle Creek, the Battle of the Cane Brakes, Wilkes County, Georgia (Georgia Department of Natural Resources, 1975), and provided the genealogy section in Georgia’s Signers and the Declaration of Independence (Cherokee Publishing Co., 1981) covering the genealogy of our three signers, Gwinnett, Hall, and Walton. Ken’s personal project leading up to the nation’s 250th anniversary was to submit supplemental applications to the Sons of the American Revolution honoring all eight of his great-grandparents. So far, he has completed six of these. He also recently discovered that he is blood related to Georgia RevWar heroine Nancy Morgan Hart, via her father, from Orange County, North Carolina.
