Yeah, I know, I was going to put this under regular tips and musings, but the research into Military and anything related, is so specific, that it deserves its own page. Not saying that some of the more general tips won't make it on the regular research page though, I just wanted to add them to this one, in case the military part is all you're coming to visit for. There are, however, considerations that work for all research, and I'm swiftly covering them here as well.
If you just want to know a little bit about your ancestor having been in the military, your eyes will cross, but on the upswing.... you may get interested enough to put a seperate part in your family history on this part of many generations' calling, profession or what you want to call it. Patriotism is as old as there are land disputes, so........ pretty much since before the very first ice-age. The difference is the way it takes shape. I'm not going to argue one over the other, whichever "side" your ancestor was on was, according to his moral compass, the right side. So there's no slights, no namecalling, no digs, just good clean fun and brainwork involved in (military)research.
Mostly, the resources are "general military". Not to say they don't have sections per conflict, but let's face facts.... Someone who enlisted in whatever army in 1912 and still served in 1950 served during peacetime as well as wartime, so if websites were to only cover conflicts, you would miss out on information for your ancestors' military career for 27 to 29 years..... so, aren't you glad they cover everything? :-)
Also be aware that service members may have served in different branches. We have several friends that have retired from both the Air Force and the Army, so if you expect a Navy hit when searching for your service member but get an Air Force result, go check it out anyway. You never know, he may just have jumped ship :-)
There will be very specialized websites, where you know by the header if they're useful to you or not. I always like and dislike these :-). You see, I'm curious, so anything connected, I want to explore. If the site is very specialized, with little references to the other parts that in my mind belong together..... I get grumpy. On the other hand, if they ARE very specialized, the chance that you're finding REALLY good stuff gets bigger! So yeah, mixed bag, but not a bad bag. LOL!
One thing I can't stress enough: There are static websites, like NARA-research, Fold3 and The National Archives out there, that ONLY deal with actual records, that can be depended upon that they are 99.9% accurate. Than there are the websites like Ancestry that are a mixed bag of static records, transcribed vital records and user information. This is where I'm VERY cautious as to what to believe and more times than not, just go to the sourced records themself and forget about the rest.
Static records are made at the source and used and distributed "as is" in unaltered form. And even there, if I see something crossed out and "corrected" at a later date, I get leary. There are too many people out there that think their version of events are the only right ones, and if they find something that doesn't conform, it doesn't make them think, it makes them want toalter existing records. They may have it right, but without the reasoning behind the alteration, I have a hard time accepting it as fact...
Transcribed records are only as good as the person transcribing them. If you do any search in the indexes for the Census' you see what I mean. It's not maliciousness, or "doing it wrong" but handwriting can be tricky, handwriting from 200 years ago, can be downright horrifying. To be a clerk or record keeper, you had to, obviously, be able to read and write, but nowhere in the curriculum was penmanship mentioned, so we look with 2020 eyes at 1780 handwriting. Add to that that people giving the information sometimes had an ethnic related accent so the information taker had to wing it, and go by what they heard, and (just because I can) let's throw in the difficulty in reading old handwritings, and that error is almost inevitable. So, if at all possible, look at the actual records and use the transcribed version as a guide. For example, the pronunciation of the the letter E in Dutch sounds like an A in English, and than there's the OE, EU, AU, OU, W (way) V (day) double A's, O's, E's and U's and the ever confusing EI, IJ and UI sounds to consider and that's only one language that our forfathers could have used when spelling things with an accent)
Sourced information should be the backbone of any type of research. Even if the source is Aunt Bessie!! Too many times have I seen people apropriating relatives that could not possible BE relatives and doing so based on 1 fact that seems to fit, but falls apart pretty quickly if you look any further, so do your due diligence, and double check, dates, names, ages etc. Even if information is sourced, do yourself a favor, and check the source as well. For one, you can confidently use the sourcing, because you KNOW it's correct, but if the person citing the sources isn't accurate in either the use or the content, you can happily move to another source of information, because you really don't want to have to unravel that kind of a headache 5 years down the road :-) If someone doesn't source at all, or is vague, treat the information as a "possible research direction" only. It may be correct, but you'll never know for sure. Keep it separate from your "good" information at all times, so you don't inadvertently put it out there as truth.
That's it for my "soupboxie" part of the research tips...- If you have a date of birth and place, you can find the parents
- If you have the parents, you can search census records and city-indexes
- If you have a unit he belonged to, you may be able to find out where the unit was during his time in the military, find a roster to determine his precise dates with that unit, maybe even unit pictures and/or his enlistment date/place
- If you have a "place of enlistment" you can possibly find where the family lived at the time of enlistment, and if there's a city index, who is part of the household
- If you have just an enlistment place listed but no other information, most likely he went to the closest enlistment office to his hometown, so, search for his name within 50 miles of it and see where you land
- If you have a place of residence, you may be able to find where he worked before he enlisted or find the closes enlistment office
- If you have his enlistment record, you can verify: date of birth, parents, whether he's married or single, whether he has dependents, who his next of kin is, and where he was employed
- If a branch of service is listed, you can find out where they trained up after enlistment, where they were "staged" before going overseas etc.
- Newspapers may have the latest waves of men enlisting for the area
- Town or County histories may have list of all service men, returning and/or lost
- Census records from 1930 and/or 1940 or the State Census records from 1935 may have his family unit, so you can piece together if he was a married man, or single and who his parents and siblings were
- From the Census, you can figure out if he may show up in a yearbook and possibly find a picture of your soldier
- You can do a search for enlistment offices in the area
Websites links:
- As mentioned before, THE website to find anything military related, be it images of actual records generated from Military Service, or information about the Revolutionary War, or another continent altogether, is www.Fold3. com. The name stands for the Third Fold in the flag folding ceremony... Honoring and remembering veterans for their service and sacrifice.
- A very informative one, is www.Findagrave.com. Here you can find a lot of links, information, relatives, and the only drawback being that your ancestor HAS to be dead and (sadly enough) physically buried. The reason I say, sadly for the buried part, is that if the ashes of someone are dispersed, even at a cemetery, and there is no gravesite or marker, the administrator of Find a Grave will most likely remove the memorial as there is no grave. I don't agree, because sometimes there IS a grave but it is no longer marked, but "them's the rules"...... (As it was "explained to me when I questioned the removal of a memorial for a possible family member, "The website name is Find a GRAVE, so no grave, no memorial). As for information in the memorials as well as links to relatives, just remember.... it's people filling in the memorials and putting the links in, with no or little sourcing to follow up with, so...... practice customary caution.
- National Archives: www.archives.gov
- family search: www.familysearch.org
- Ancestry: www.ancestry.com
- Defence POW/MIA Accounting Agency: www.dpaa.mil
- American Battle Monument Commission: www.ABMC.gov
- Navy: CRMforce.mil
- Similar information as DAPP: www.projectrecover. org
- Missing and Killed In Action per state: www.honorstates.org
- Traces of War is a Dutch nonprofit covering World War 2 and everything associated with it: www.tracesofwar.com
- https://www.sonsoflibertymuseum.org/mission.cfm. is a painful endeavor with trying to navigate between the adds, but it has quite a lot of leads for further research. The information itself is not spectacularly unique, but the fact that it's all in one place definitely makes it interesting.
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