Yesterday I wrote about my distant cousin, Sophia Colman, who married Dr. John H. Van Evrie, one of the most outspoken racist and pro-slavery writers of the 19th century. Her sister, Cornelia Colman (1830-1914), found herself connected to the Civil War in an entirely different way.

Cornelia married Edward Stuyvesant Bragg, a Wisconsin lawyer who entered the Union Army on July 16, 1861, and rose from captain of Company E, 6th Wisconsin Infantry to brigadier general. Bragg became closely associated with the famous Iron Brigade, earning him the nickname of “Little General” and surviving years of some of the war’s fiercest fighting. After the war, he went on to serve in Congress and in diplomatic posts.

When Bragg died in 1912, Cornelia was about 80 years old. The records reveal a poignant detail about her final years: although her husband had received a government pension for his military service, Cornelia herself was not automatically pensioned as his widow. Her case went before Congress. A Senate petition report noted that she had cared devotedly for the general through his declining years and final illness, that she had little property beyond her home, and recommended that she receive $50 per month.

Cornelia lived only about two more years, dying in 1914 at her home in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, at the age of 82. Her obituary still identified her as the widow of the commander of the famed Iron Brigade – but the pension record gives up something more personal: a glimpse of the elderly woman who had cared for the celebrated general and then had to petition the government for support after he was gone.

Two Colman sisters, born into the same family, whose marriages placed them on remarkably different pages of Civil War history.