Mary E. Buckey

My first week of research is officially over!  It feels like yesterday was Monday, but I have all these pensions to show for my work--and still, it feels like I've barely brushed the surface of all the information that's in those files.  Next week I should be pulling files for women like Sarah E. Clapp (a contract surgeon rather than a nurse) and Harriet Patience Dame (a regimental nurse who gained wartime fame for her service), as well as lesser known characters like Sarah B. Cross, who came to the US during the war and spent two years at Lincoln General Hospital while her husband worked for the government.  Hopefully the other files will be just as interesting.
As much as I love pulling pensions and getting to know these women, though, the information in the files isn't helping me with my thesis as much as I hoped it would.  I also haven't heard back about the legislative files.  Monday morning, I'm taking in my binder of legislative bills and we'll see what they have.  I haven't given up hope on this yet.
Anyway, on to something relating to the title of this post: Mary E. Buckey.  I like to do profiles of the women I pull--it helps me sort through information, and share some of the more interesting women I've met.  So far I've posted on a famous nurse (Bickerdyke), a hospital nurse (Allen), and a money-grubbing nurse (Blaisdell).  All these women have one thing in common: they volunteered.  Mary E. Buckey did not.

Pension File: 1129426
P.O.: Beverly, West Virginia
Service: Nurse, Med. Dept, US Vols.
Applied: 1892
Final Status: Rejected
In every single pension file I have read so far, the women came to the war, not the other way around.  They had loved ones in the army, or simply wanted to help their boys, or do their bit to defend their country.  If the West Virginia P.O. didn't clue you in, or the suitably obvious intro, the war came to Buckey.  "When the union troops commanded by Geo. B McClellan first entered the valley after the battle of Rich Mt. in July 1861," Buckey wrote in her claim, "sick and wounded union soldiers were brought to my house and placed under my care as nurse.  From that date until the close of the War of the Rebellion I was at no time without union soldiers under my care."
Four years.  Four years she lived with strangers in her house, and not just any strangers: the military.  As far as I can tell she was recognized by the staff at the nearby general hospital (Geoff House) as a nurse, but was never paid or compensated for her work.  In 1892 Buckey filed for a pension based on her four-year service.  Periodic attacks of sciatica made it impossible for her to work steadily and she needed the money.  The Bureau, for whatever reason, took its time processing the claim--three years, in fact.  And in the end, they rejected it on the grounds that Buckey wasn't appointed nurse by someone the War Department deemed to have sufficient authority.
I am quickly learning that the Pension Bureau has a very simple motto: "Rules is rules, even if the rules are unfair."