[2] With no other means to repay her kindness, Bolin offered to marry Jackson so she would become eligible to receive his pension after he died.

[4] The marriage was recorded in Bolin's family Bible and other documents verified by Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War.

[4] Prior to this revelation Maudie Hopkins, who died in 2008, was believed to have been the last surviving wife of a Civil War soldier.

At the time of her death, she was the oldest publicly known Civil War widow, although others were believed to be alive but unidentified.

Born as Maudie Cecelia Acklin in Baxter County, Arkansas, she married William M. Cantrell (aged 86) on February 2, 1934, when she was 19.

Cantrell had enlisted in the Confederate States Army at age 16 in Pikeville, Kentucky, and served in General Samuel G. French's Battalion of Virginia Infantry.

Hopkins generally kept her first marriage a secret, fearing that the resulting gossip (of her marrying a much older man) would damage her reputation.

A spokeswoman for the UDC, Martha Boltz, has said that there may be two other widows, one in Tennessee and another in North Carolina, but if they are still alive, they choose to remain anonymous.

[citation needed] Hopkins died on August 17, 2008, in a nursing home in Lexa, Arkansas, aged 93.

On December 10, 1927, the then-21-year-old Stewart married the 81-year-old Martin, primarily to get help raising her son and because his $50 per month Confederate pension check guaranteed her a degree of financial security.

Alberta and Charlie Martin were married for more than fifty years until his death in 1983, after which she moved to Elba, Alabama.

[11] She appeared to relish the attention the media brought her and attended many Civil War themed re-enactments and other events as an honored guest.

[11] Following her death from a heart attack at the age of 97 on May 12, 2004,[14] the thrice-widowed Martin was given an "1860s style ceremony" with full honors as the widow of a Confederate veteran.

On April 9, 2011, The Economist commented on her as an example of the length of pension obligations: When Gertrude Janeway died in 2003, she was still getting a monthly check for $70 from the Veterans Administration—for a military pension earned by her late husband, John, on the Union side of the American Civil War that ended in 1865.