Sunday, June 11, 2006

World War II draft registration cards



I finally had a chance to look at the World War II draft registration cards on Ancestry.com at the Family History Center yesterday.

The cards that are available so far are for males born between 28 April 1877 and 18 February 1897 - this was the fourth registration and was for males aged 45 to 64. The version of the database I used had cards only for the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and West virginia. Eastman's article some time ago included Massachusetts, Ohio and Arkansas, but I didn't see any from those states.

There is a problem with some of the images in the version of the database I used yesterday. Some images show two images - the front of a card and the back of a card. The problem, pointed out months ago by Elissa Scalise Powell, is that the images are not for the same person. Somehow they messed up the filming. When only one side of the card is shown, there is an arrow to go to the next image, but that image is not the back of the card shown in the first image. It's very confusing, since it appears that the back of the card was filmed before the front of the card.

Joan Lowrey, in an APG list post, said that they were trying to fix this, and that you could manipulate the URL to see the back of the card by substituting a ".1" in place of the ".2" in the URL. She also stated that not all of the cards for a given state are presented, only some of them.

If you do find someone on the cards, the information is great! I'll have to revisit this database occasionally to see if new states have been added.

Dick Eastman's blog post has a lot more info here.

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