Stranger Than Fiction
New discoveries of old occurrences are constantly being made. Case in point: recently, a Civil War widow who applied for benefits was credited a pension. The only problem is that it took 147 years.
Virgil Covit from Chatham County, North Carolina was conscripted into the Confederate army in 1864. Soon thereafter, he was killed in action. It took twenty years before the state started offering benefits to Confederate widows. Mrs. Covit was denied because officials couldn’t find a record of her husband on war registries. Unfortunately for her, the search had been carried out for a “Virgil Covert.”
Researchers conducting a Civil War deaths study financed by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources recently discovered the error. It is believed that the mistake was made when Mrs. Covit spoke her husband’s name, and because of her dialect and lack of literary skills, the misspelled name was never corrected … until now. Sorry Mrs. Covit – too little too late.
