Questions families ask

A name will start the search. Everything else you can find will shorten it.

We can begin with a name alone, and we have. But we'd rather be straight with you than flatter you: the more you bring us, the more we can bring back. A birth year and a hometown can narrow a common name from a thousand men down to a handful. A service number goes straight to him.

And if you can put your hands on one thing, make it his discharge paper. It's the gold standard — his service number, his unit, his dates, and his medals, all on a single page. Hand us that and we can go straight at the records, instead of spending the first stretch of the search working out which of the four hundred men with his name he was.

Can't find it? Don't let that stop you, and don't spend a month hunting for it first. There's a good chance a copy still exists and we can help you get it — that's further down this page. Send us the name and we'll take it from there.

One veteran, $99. Flat. It doesn't climb because his file turned out to be a difficult one.

You don't pay it when you send the form, and you don't pay it to find out whether we can help. We look into him first, then come back to you with an honest read on what we believe we can recover. Only then is the $99 due — and only if you want us to carry on.

A portion of every fee goes to Remember WWII, a nonprofit that films the testimony of the World War II veterans still with us — catching the story while the man is here to tell it, the way we go after it once he's gone. The work is a thank-you. So is the money.

A few days for that first honest read. Three to six weeks for the finished reconstruction.

The archives keep their own hours. A records pull can sit in a queue for a week before anyone touches it, and a morning report has to be read line by line by a human being — there is no search box for this. We'd rather tell you six weeks and surprise you than promise you two and go quiet.

Then you find that out before you owe us anything. That is exactly what the first read is for.

Some trails really are thin, and we won't take your money to go looking down one we don't believe in. If that's what we find, we'll tell you plainly, and it will have cost you nothing but the five minutes it took to ask.

Less to do with what you have than with how much the Army wrote about him.

A man who was decorated, wounded, promoted, or moved between outfits left a wide trail: award cards, citations, a dozen clerks with a reason to type his name. A man who did a steady job in a quiet unit and came home without a scratch left a narrower one. His service is still on the record — the morning reports still put him somewhere, every day he served — but it takes longer to draw out, and what comes back may be a quieter story than a war film.

It is still his story, and it is still worth having. It's also why we look first and tell you honestly what we think we can recover, before you owe us anything. We would rather tell you what kind of story is waiting than take your money and hope.

Whatever you have. The more the better — and none of it is required.

If you can lay hands on one thing, make it his discharge paper (a WD AGO 53-55 for a WWII soldier, a DD-214 for later service). His service number is printed on it, and the service number is the thread that pulls everything else loose.

And send the photographs. All of them. A discharge paper tells us where he was; a photograph shows us the man who was there. They earn their keep twice over — the patch on his shoulder or the markings on a truck behind him can name the unit we're hunting for, and once we've found his war, his own face is what turns a timeline into something your family will actually sit down and read. Blurry ones, unlabelled ones, the ones where nobody's sure who's who: send those too. We can often tell you what you're looking at.

After that: letters, a diary, medals and insignia, and the stories nobody ever wrote down. Each one gives us something to pull on. Send what you've got and we'll go after the rest.

Then we go and get it — together.

When he came home, there's a good chance he walked into the county courthouse and filed his discharge with the recorder's office so that it could never be lost. Plenty of those copies are still sitting in their filing cabinets, eighty years on. Not all of them — but it is the first place worth looking, and it costs you nothing to look.

So we'll work out which county is most likely to hold his, and who at that office to write to. Then we'll draft the request for you: the words, the address, the right thing to ask for. You won't have to work out what to say to a records clerk.

Here is the one part we can't do for you: you have to be the one to send it. Most records offices will release a veteran's papers only to next of kin, so the request has to come from the family, in your name. We'll be at your elbow for every line of it. We just can't sign it.

Quite possibly, yes. A 1973 fire destroyed millions of Army personnel files, and if his was among them, that closes one door. One.

The Army ran on paperwork, and copied nearly all of it, in the field, in triplicate. Every morning his unit filed a report of who was present, sick, transferred, promoted, or lost. Muster rolls counted him. Unit journals recorded where his outfit was and what it was doing. Award cards logged his medals. That paperwork was filed separately from his personnel record, and it was not what burned.

That's the trail. It is slower to follow than a personnel file, and it does not answer every question a personnel file would have answered. But it is still there, and it is a great deal more than most families are ever told.

As much of his service as the records will give up — written down, and sourced to the page.

Where he trained. What unit he belonged to, and what that unit was actually doing while he was in it. Where he was, as closely as the paper allows: sometimes month by month, sometimes closer, and sometimes with a gap in it. The day he shipped out and the day he came home, when those days survive. And beside every line of it, the record it came from, so you can see for yourself.

We won't invent the parts we can't find. Where the trail goes quiet, we'll tell you it went quiet, and tell you what it would take to go further. A guess dressed up as a fact is worth nothing to your family, and it's not what we do.

All of it in language your whole family can read. Not a file — a story you can hand to your children.

The honest way to answer this question is to show you a finished one.