Hello. Did you ever check to see if his widow got a pension? With seven
children I can promise you she needed some help even before she would have qualified
for a widow's pension. Usually there was some sort of effort to help widow women
as there were so many of them after the Civil War.
Could the Union army have taken him to use his services?
You are also using a child's memory after they were grown. I can promise you that
my daughter's memory of some things that happened and the way I know it
happened, are different. It is also possible that the man was not near as old as his kids thought.
You may want to do some census work like checking the 1860 census if you have not already.
Good luck.