Slogging through the 150 or so pages of Joe’s military pension file, a curious exchange appears. In 1913, as Joe struggled to have the government grant him a pension increase, he was tasked with proving his identity to the pension authority. To do this he turned to the Belonger family bible, the same bible, I […]

Finally put two and two together! Joe was hospitalized on August 6, 1864. On that same date, the 25th Michigan Infantry was attached to Schofield’s Army of the Ohio. A much smaller Confederate force under Hood’s command was securely ensconced in the wooded hills around Utoy Creek, and they were the only thing standing between […]

Here is a photographic exercise for you. Augustin, the gentleman pictured here, never worked for the Blonger brothers, never drank with them, was never swindled by them, never took a bribe from them or investigated them. In his entire life he probably never heard their names once and he almost certainly never met any of […]

The six Blonger brothers also had three sisters: Elizabeth, who apparently died unmarried, Mary, the youngest and mother of five, and Julia, born second after Simon. We know that Julia had seven children by a man named Revoir, and that they disappeared from the public record when they moved east in 1892. Now we know […]

Harold Gordon was kind enough to share this find of his, a business card he discovered in a collection of Victorian-era Masonic calling cards. Tony Neis was the man who recruited Sam and Lou into the Rocky Mountain Detective Association when he established an Albuquerque office in 1882. Their membership in the group appears to […]