Nancy (Hancock) Corn’s Pension File

Jesse Corn’s wife, Nancy, applied for a widow’s pension from Jesse’s revolutionary service in 1841. A series of obstacles prevented the government from granting this pension for more than nine years.  As a result, the papers for her pension application grew to be more than 60 pages. Now residing in the National Archives (NARA), a copy of this file was obtained. Documents within that file expose the governmental delays regarding her claim. They also provide the information presented by her council that managed to facilitate the granting of her pension (albeit after her death).  In addition to the court records and correspondence regarding the case, documents in the file include:

·       The cover, and Jesse’s hand-written page with the names and birthdates for him and his family, from his Bible.

·       A copy of Jesse and Nancy’s marriage certificate from the Fluvanna County Court in Virginia.

·       Several pension award certificates for Nancy and her then living heirs.

Transcriptions have been made of the documents in Nancy’s file, but require the use of Adobe Acrobat software to view them.  If you do  have not Acrobat installed on your system, you can do so now by downloading Adobe's free Acrobat Reader, before attempting to view the transcripts.  The pages of Nancy’s file were also scanned and digital images are available.  However, the scanned images require more space than is available on this web site. Thus, they are only made available on the Jesse Corn CD.

These replicas and transcripts of Nancy’s pension file are being provided as the result of a joint effort undertaken by Becky & Larry Christiansen, Tangela Holcomb, and Tom Melton.