Friday, August 4, 2006

World War II military records

The best collection of links to US Military Indexes and Records is at Joe Beine's site, www.militaryindexes.com. This site has links for each US war period, and includes government, subscription or other free data sources.

I was interested in finding Seaver folks in the World War II records. Although my father served in the US Navy, I collect Seaver data when I find it and then add it to my database.

I had checked the World War II Army Enlistment Records, 1938-1946, at the FHC last week on Ancestry.com, and had copied the index list of all Seaver entries in the database (136 people), and also copied one of the transcriptions for a George F. Seaver.

The index list on Ancestry.com gives the name, birth year, nativity, residence state, enlistment date, enlistment state. The transcribed individual record on Ancestry.com provides all of those, plus the race, branch of service, grade, term of enlistment, component, source, education, civil occupation, marital status, height and weight.

Today, I found George F. Seaver in the NARA Access to Archival Databases site. The data provided is similar to the Ancestry data, plus it gives the individual's service number, but it doesn't provide the height or weight. I can obtain this information from the AAD essentially for free - I can download the record to my hard drive or print the record for each person.

There are over 9 million entries in the Army Enlistment Records. There are also over 143,000 WWII Army Prisoner of War records at the NARA AAD site.

Havbe you found all of your family members who served in World War I or II?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

How can that be?