Shortly after leaving the Navy in 1864, Ann Stokes married Gilbert Stokes, a black man employed on the Red Rover. They moved to Illinois where he died in 1866. She remarried George Bowman in 1867 and lived on a farm in Illinois.
In the 1880s, she applied unsuccessfully for a pension based on her marriage to Stokes and Bowman. The pension process was even more difficult because she could not read or write.
As her health grew worse, she reapplied again for a pension in 1890, stating that she had "piles and heart disease." She had by then learned to read and write and put down her own arguments, emphasizing that she was basing her claim on her own military service, not a former husband.
--Old B-Runner
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