Abner Fish is my 3rd-great-grandfather. There are strong rumors around the internet about who his parents are but a significant lack of facts. Bernd and I took a research class this past week in Washington, DC to learn how to use the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Daughters of the American Revolution Library. One of my goals was to figure out Abner’s parents but no luck on that yet.
The National Archives have the payroll, muster records, bounty land, and pensions for the War of 1812. So I decided to see what family information I could find in those records. And although I found one very small clue that might lead me to parents someday, I mostly found a new puzzle. If we have any kids in the family that need a history research project, I could use some help on this new puzzle.
Ohio drafted men into the Ohio Militia and into the Continental Army. Abner was drafted into the Militia rather than the Continental Army, and I think he stayed in the Militia for the duration of the war. In all the official records about the Ohio Militia, each man was drafted into a District or Division which was subdivided into Regiments which were subdivided into companies. So at any individual level, each man reported to the Captain of his Company and may or may not have paid any attention to the rest of the organizational structure.
If the man served the entire war, he was entitled to a pension and to “bounty land”. Bounty land was free land (40-80-160 acres) depending on a variety of laws and the man’s rank in the military. But for the Revolutionary War just a few years earlier, pensions were for those men or their widows that “needed” the help. Although the financial need was not a criterion for the War of 1812 pension, there may still have been some sensitivity to need since none of the Fish who served in Ohio took a pension.
Ohio had some Regiments that were called “Odd Regiments” not because there was anything particularly odd about the people in the Regiment but because they were created from areas that couldn’t supply enough men to fill a complete Regiment. So these “Odd Regiments” were used to augment other larger Regiments who needed extra people for a particular battle.
18-year-old Abner was not in an “Odd” Regiment but he was definitely in some truly unusual military positions. At first, I thought there were two Abner Fish who served in the Ohio Militia from around the same area because there were two complete military service files. But strangely enough, the files made it very clear that both service files belonged to the same man.
For the entire War, Abner was officially in two different Regiments and as many as four different companies — at the exact same time! One of the genealogists teaching the research who was a war expert had never heard of such a thing. The archivists at the National Archives were even more perplexed — not only did Abner have these strange duty records, but he also filed twice for bounty land and received it twice! The second time even notated that he was getting a second allotment of bounty land, implying that the second allotment was due to his strange service records.
So far I have only been able to dig up one clue on what Abner was doing. He was drafted into the Militia on Aug 24th or so in 1812. He was immediately registered into two Regiments and two Companies. Depending on whose records are to be believed, on September 17th or 23rd Abner was sent off to a third Company under Captain Cotton. (This is just a scribbled note on his records from the second Regiment.)
There is a recently released report that Captain Cotton was responsible for leading a battle against Indians that had massacred all the people in a fort on “The Peninsula” in Ohio on September 29th. Although Captain Cotton won the battle, it was not without injuries to his troops and a significant loss of life. Abner survived to continue his mysterious military service, but does have some lost time marked as “furlough”, “sick”, and “absent” after that battle.
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| Pay Roll Card from Col William Rayen’s Regiment |
So was the Company that Abner considered his primary “home” a special skills company? Was 18-year-old Abner a skilled Indian fighter?
Instead of getting questions answered about Abner on this last trip, I ended up with more questions.
