Government headstone

Congress gave honorably discharged Union veterans the right to burial in national cemeteries in 1873, and an act of February 3, 1879, extended free headstones to soldiers buried in private village or city cemeteries. The Quartermaster General kept a card record of each stone contract.

The cards, covering about 1879 to 1903, list rank, company and regiment, cemetery and town, grave number, date of death and the contractor who supplied the stone. If an ancestor's grave has a government stone, the card can confirm his unit and death date.