Action4Heritage is a national emergency response to the erasure of Black history. As archives are defunded, digital collections vanish, and political hostility targets the very telling of our stories, Action4Heritage mobilizes descendants, historians, and technologists to act—now. This is not heritage work as usual. It is guerrilla archiving, digital resistance, and collective memory on life support.
We’re building tools, scanning records, and reclaiming buried narratives before they disappear forever. Our cultural survival and our youth's future depends on it.
Our journey in this work is reflected in the Black lives we preserve.
Here, we share our stories of our rebellion—a continuation of our ancestors' legacy to protect and share our history.
This is a rescue mission. In a season when the history of slavery and its legacies is being narrowed in classrooms, softened in exhibits, and “updated” online, Saving Our Ancestors’ Legacy (SOAL) and our rapid-response initiative Action4Heritage are preserving the primary sources that prove the lives, faith, and kinship of Black families—before they can be altered, defunded, or disappear.
This summer, through the generosity of Market Square Presbyterian Church, SOAL acquired a professional overhead scanner and deployed volunteers to the National Archives in Washington DC to digitize United States Colored Troops (USCT) pension application files.
There are no other copies of these files. They live—fragile, unindexed—in boxes. Page by page, they contain sworn testimony, marriage proofs, disability records, pastor and midwife affidavits, neighbors’ statements, and the tangled routes by which families moved from bondage to freedom. When hostile winds blow against Black history, preserving the paper is protecting the people.
Most people hear “pension file” and picture a thin military folder: a regiment number, a list of battles, a note about a wound. USCT widow’s and invalid pension files are nothing like that. They are thick community archives created under oath, in which Black soldiers, widows, relatives, neighbors, midwives, pastors, and comrades tell a legally consequential story about family, marriage, migration, illness, work, and survival.
Because the federal government required proof—of lawful marriage, of a soldier’s identity and death, of a widow’s dependency—Black families brought the only proofs they had: names, memories, witnesses, and the everyday paper trail of their lives.
Used well, a single USCT pension file can map a family network (FAN), date a flight from slavery, document customary marriage (“jumping the broom”) as it met the letter of the law, and locate Black neighborhoods and church worlds that do not appear anywhere else. It is not “just a soldier’s record.” It is a community deposition, taken page by page.
From the pension file of Abraham Anderson, 8th USCT
“I, Abraham Anderson, am about 59 years of age as far as I know. My post office address is Harrisburg, box 267. I was born in the slave state of Maryland in Washington County, about 12 miles east of Hagerstown and about six miles from Williamsport on the Potomac River. My master's name was George Lefevre. Then, about the time when the last war broke out from 1860 to 1865, I and some other colored men united and ran away from our masters rather than fight for them and came to the state of Pennsylvania and worked with some farmers in Franklin and Cumberland counties and others. When the war was in full blast, I and some other colored men combined to go to war too and fight our country through. So we did go and had enlisted for three years, and then at the close of the war in 1865, I settled in Harrisburg.”
Abraham’s affidavit does what no textbook summary can do. It names places, choices, risks, neighbors, and a home—Harrisburg. In 2022, SOAL volunteers uncovered his broken, sunken headstone at Historic Lincoln Cemetery; it took a year of careful restoration even to reveal his name.
This summer, with MSPC’s scanner, we captured his entire pension file—Abraham speaking for himself, preserved for his descendants and for the public.
When public memory is contested, communities need sources that courts, classrooms, congregations, and families can trust. USCT pension files are legal records created close to the events themselves—naming spouses, children, enslavers, churches, injuries, and migrations. They let us say, with evidence: this marriage was real; this service was rendered; this congregation and this city helped make freedom possible.
While digitizing the file of USCT veteran William Burris, SOAL corrected his wife’s misreported maiden name—a single, documented fact that broke a generational “brick wall,” reopening cross-state migration trails and reconnecting living relatives. Time and again, these files restore women’s histories, hidden kinship, and the everyday work of neighbors and pastors erased elsewhere.
Beyond the Archives, SOAL leads Lincoln Cemetery Restoration Weekends every third Friday–Sunday, noon to dusk from March to November—resetting stones, recording names, mapping family plots, and teaching hands-on stewardship. Through Action4Heritage, we also train volunteers to digitize, transcribe, and describe materials in small museums and independent archives so evidence remains free and findable.