Finding Your Unit’s Veterans for a Reunion
You are not tracing one person. You are holding a list – twenty names, or ninety, or a mimeographed company roster with the serial numbers still printed down the side – and almost none of the addresses on it are any good. That single fact turns the usual method upside down. The paperwork the unit generated, and the association the unit’s veterans built afterward, will do more for you than ninety separate lookups. And two of the most valuable things this work returns are not addresses at all: a corrected legal name, and the knowledge that somebody on your list has already died.
The Short Version
Before you look for anybody, look for the unit. A great many outfits already have an association, a newsletter and a secretary who has been keeping a mailing list for thirty years, and half an hour spent finding that person beats a week of individual searching. Then work the unit’s records rather than the men’s. The National Archives holds morning reports and unit rosters that name who was present on a given day, and for the Army through 1968 those are already open to the public – though not, as you will see, by mail. Expect the individual personnel files to be closed to you. A veteran’s own file only opens to the general public sixty-two years after separation, so unless your reunion is a Korea or World War Two outfit, that door is shut and next of kin are the ones who can open it. Check for deaths before you send anything. A letter addressed to a man who died in 2019, opened by his widow, is a wound you inflicted by not looking. Then triage. Common surnames, women who changed names, and the two or three people the whole roster remembers will not all take the same effort, and pretending otherwise is how organizers burn out in March.
Watch: Working a Roster Instead of a Name
Why the unit’s own paperwork outranks any individual lookup when you are holding a list.
Short video overview
A Roster Inverts the Usual Search
Most people-finding starts with one name and no leads. You have the opposite problem, and it wants the opposite method.
Run the arithmetic before you run anything else. Say the list has sixty names on it. Worked one at a time, each one is a fresh identity puzzle: a common surname, an initial where a middle name should be, a last known town from a Christmas card in 1994. Sixty of those is not a search, it is a second job. Now consider the other direction. If the outfit has an association, one telephone call may hand you forty of the sixty with current addresses, because a volunteer has been maintaining them since the men were in their fifties. The single highest-yield hour in this entire process is the hour you spend establishing whether somebody has already done the work.
So begin at the top. Find out whether the division, regiment, battalion, squadron, ship or air group has an association, a newsletter, an annual gathering, or a historian – and understand that these three things are different. An association has officers and dues. A reunion group may be four people and a spreadsheet. A unit historian is frequently one determined individual, often a son or daughter rather than a veteran, who has spent fifteen years assembling everything about the outfit and can tell you within a minute who is living. Any of the three can hand you a mailing list. None of them shows up in a search for an individual name, which is exactly why the individual-first approach wastes so much of an organizer’s time.
Work outward from there. The American Legion publishes reunion notices, and Veterans of Foreign Wars, AMVETS and Disabled American Veterans all run magazines and post networks where reunion announcements circulate; posts local to a former home station are worth a call in their own right. There is also a small commercial layer – reunion registries and full-service reunion planners such as the Military Reunion Network and Armed Forces Reunions, along with veteran directory sites like Together We Served and VetFriends where members list the units they served in. We are naming those rather than linking them because they are private businesses whose membership terms and coverage change, and you should look at what they currently offer before you register anything. Their common limitation is the same one: they only contain the people who chose to sign up. A directory is a self-selected sample, and the men you most want are frequently the ones who never joined anything.
Be honest with yourself about the hit rate, too, because the disappointment is what stops reunions from happening. On a roster of any size you should expect a meaningful fraction to be deceased, a smaller fraction to be genuinely unfindable through any lawful record, and a few who are perfectly findable and simply will not come. That is not a failure of method. If you want a sense of what a bulk list looks like from the organizer’s chair before you commit, the same triage logic drives our guide to tracking down classmates for a high school reunion, where the list is bigger and the records are thinner. And if what you actually have is one name that has nagged at you for forty years rather than a roster, that is a different job with a different shape, and finding one specific person you served with is the page for it.
What the Archives Hold About the Unit, Not the Man
Unit-level records are a separate category from a service member’s own file, with their own dates, their own rules and one rule that surprises everybody.
The record you want is the morning report. A unit clerk recorded, day by day, who was present for duty and who was not – sick, wounded, on leave, transferred in, transferred out, promoted, killed – by name. Read across a stretch of dates rather than at a single point, and a run of morning reports rebuilds the actual roster of the men who were standing there with you, including the ones nobody remembers by surname. Unit rosters do the same job in list form. One caution for ship and Marine committees before you read any further: the guidance set out below is written for Army and Air Force morning reports specifically, and the dates and access rules in it do not transfer to naval commands, so ask the Archives which series covers your ship and your era rather than assuming the Army answer applies to it. None of these are addresses. They are names, and for the older material, service numbers. That is precisely the missing ingredient when your list says “Sgt. Wilkins” and nothing else.
Now the part that trips people. Those records split into two piles with opposite rules, and the more open pile is the harder one to use. The National Archives states plainly on its page covering access to morning reports and unit rosters that Army morning reports and unit rosters dated 1912 to 1968, and all Air Force morning reports, are archival – accessioned into the Archives and open to the public. Good news, until you read the next line: “Written requests for archival Morning Reports and Unit Rosters are not accepted.” Access is by visiting the Archival Research Room at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, or by employing an independent researcher to examine them on your behalf. There is no fee to review an archival record in that room, and appointments run through an attendant reachable on 314-801-0850. The Archives also warns that the microfilmed images are frequently illegible, that it does not mail photocopies of filmed rosters or morning reports, and that it will not sell duplicate reels.
Army morning reports and unit rosters dated 1969 to 1974 are non-archival, which sounds more restricted and is, in one useful respect, easier: you can request copies by mail or fax. The Archives points to the requirement in federal law – it cites 5 U.S.C. 552a – that requests be made in writing, and adds two details worth writing on a sticky note before you post anything: the request must be signed in cursive and dated within the last year. A search fee may be assessed for non-archival records, currently at a rate of thirteen dollars and twenty-five cents an hour plus copying, payable before the search runs. And if you want to look at Army non-archival morning reports in person rather than order copies, you first need written authorization from the Department of the Army Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts Office at 7701 Telegraph Road, Alexandria, Virginia.
Two gaps to know about before you build a plan around any of this. Army rosters covering 1944 to 1946 were destroyed under the General Records Schedule and are no longer available – not damaged, not restricted, simply gone, which lands squarely on the units a great many World War Two reunions are built around. And whatever you request, the Archives asks you to supply the exact unit of assignment. Its own worked example is “Company A, 1st Battalion, 116th Infantry Regiment,” together with a description of what happened and an approximate date. That specificity is not bureaucratic fussiness. A clerk cannot pull a day’s report for a regiment; they pull it for a company.
Why 1973 still shapes what you can get, and why it works in your favor
On 12 July 1973 a fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis destroyed, by the Archives’ own account of the disaster, approximately sixteen to eighteen million official military personnel files. The estimated losses it publishes are brutal: eighty percent of Army records for personnel discharged between November 1912 and January 1960, and seventy-five percent of Air Force records for personnel discharged between September 1947 and January 1964 whose names fall alphabetically after Hubbard, James E. There were no duplicates, no microfilm copies and no index of what had been in the building. Around six and a half million damaged records were recovered and indexed into what the Archives calls its “B” registry, or Burned File, with a separate “R” registry for reconstructed files opened in April 1974.
That is usually written up as a wall, and for a family chasing one man’s file it is. For a reunion organizer it is closer to an opportunity, for a reason nobody explains. Reconstruction is done from alternate sources – the Archives lists Veterans Administration claims files, individual state records, Multiple Name Pay Vouchers from the Adjutant General’s Office, Selective Service registration records, pay records held by the accounting office, military hospital records, entrance and separation x-rays, and organizational records. To use them, staff need to know where a person was. And the Archives says so directly on its public-access guidance: for records affected by the fire, additional information such as place of discharge, last assigned unit, and place of entry into service may be useful. Last assigned unit is exactly the thing you have and a grieving grandchild usually does not. The organizer of a unit reunion is, without realizing it, holding the key detail that unblocks a burned-file search.
One boundary worth drawing here, because the two searches look alike from outside and are not. Everything above assumes the veterans you are looking for are alive and that you served with them. Where the searcher is a descendant working backward from a photograph and a war – grandfather gone, unit unknown, the people eventually found being the sons and daughters – the method starts from the discharge paper rather than the roster, and our guide to tracing a grandparent’s wartime unit buddies covers that version properly. Read that one if you are completing somebody else’s story. Stay here if you are trying to fill a hotel ballroom next October.
The Sixty-Two-Year Line and Who Stands Behind It
Whether you can obtain a named veteran’s own file is decided by a date, and for most living reunions the answer is no.
Every service member’s Official Military Personnel File eventually becomes a public archival record, and the trigger is time rather than death. The Archives sets it out in its description of archival personnel file holdings: records are accessioned into the National Archives, and become archival, sixty-two years after the service member’s separation from the military. It is a rolling date, so the arithmetic is simply this year minus sixty-two. Anything on the archival side of that line can be ordered by anybody for a copying fee, under a schedule the Archives operates on the authority of 44 U.S.C. 2116. Anything on the other side is non-archival, sits under the Federal Records Center program, and is subject to access restrictions. Check the current table on that page rather than trusting a year you read anywhere, this page included – the published holdings table lags the rolling date and at the time of writing runs to discharges through 1963.
Work out what that means for your particular reunion, because it changes the whole shape of the project. If you are organizing for a World War Two or Korea-era outfit, individual files are largely on the open side of the line and you can order them. If your unit is Vietnam, the Cold War Army in Germany, Desert Storm, or anything after, you cannot get a fellow veteran’s file at all, and no amount of explaining that you served alongside him changes it. That is not obstruction; it is the Privacy Act doing precisely what a veteran would want it to do.
The Archives is unusually clear about where you personally stand. On its guidance covering public access to personnel files it defines a member of the general public as somebody who is not the veteran, who is asking about a veteran of no relation to them, or who is a relative but not the next of kin. A man you shared a barracks with for two years is, in this system, a stranger. Without the veteran’s consent or that of next of kin, the records center can release only limited information from a non-archival file, and it frames the whole arrangement as a balance between the public’s right of access under the Freedom of Information Act and the veteran’s privacy under the Privacy Act.
Next of kin is defined narrowly and it is worth memorizing, because it decides who on your reunion committee can usefully make a request. The Archives lists it as the un-remarried widow or widower, son, daughter, father, mother, brother, or sister of the deceased veteran – and next of kin must supply proof of death, such as a death certificate, a letter from the funeral home, or a published obituary. There is also a third-party route: lawyers, doctors, historians and similar requesters can obtain information from an individual file with the veteran’s or next of kin’s signed and dated authorization specifying exactly what may be released. In practice, for a reunion, that means the useful move is often to reach the family first and let them request the file, rather than to request it yourself and be refused.
Six Sources, and What Each Gives a Roster
They are not substitutes for one another. Only two of them produce anything you can put on an envelope.
| Source | What it gives a list of names | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|
| Unit association or historian | An existing mailing list, often decades old and quietly maintained, plus first-hand knowledge of who has died | Only covers the men who joined; coverage collapses when the volunteer running it stops |
| Morning reports and unit rosters | Names and service numbers of who was actually present on given dates, which repairs an incomplete roster | Army 1912 to 1968 and all Air Force reports are archival, so in person in St. Louis or through a researcher only |
| An archival personnel file | A full service history for anyone separated more than sixty-two years ago, orderable by any member of the public | Historic detail, not a current address; and roughly nobody in a post-Vietnam unit qualifies yet |
| A non-archival personnel file | Limited information only, unless the veteran or next of kin authorizes more in writing | You are legally a stranger to it, however long you served together |
| Casualty lists and burial records | Confirmation that a name on your list died in service or is buried in a cemetery the government records | Coverage is partial by era and by cemetery type; absence of a record is not evidence of life |
| Public-records address research | A current, verified address and a live telephone number for names you already holdOur part | Nothing about the service itself; we do not obtain military files on your behalf |
| The pattern | Read the middle four rows together and the shape of the problem appears: the military record system is excellent at telling you who was there and almost silent on where any of them are now. The first row closes that gap for free when it exists. The last row is what you buy when it does not. | |
Notice which row is ours and how narrow it is. We do not file records requests for you, we do not stand in the Archival Research Room on your behalf, and we are not the people to ask what a morning report from March 1968 says. What we do is the last mile – taking a name, a rough vintage and whatever fragments you hold, and turning it into an address a letter will actually reach. That sits inside our ordinary skip tracing and public-records research and is not a special military service, because it is not one.
Checking Who Has Died Before the Envelopes Go Out
This is the step organizers skip, and it is the one with a real person on the other end of getting it wrong.
Picture the failure honestly. You send eighty invitations. Six of them are addressed to men who died in the last decade, and at least one is opened by a widow who has to read a cheerful note about a weekend in San Antonio and then decide whether to write back and tell a stranger. Reunion committees do this every year without meaning to, and it is entirely avoidable. Run the roster against death records before you run it against a mail merge. Where the answer comes back positive, you have not lost a guest – you have gained the chance to write to a family properly, which is often the letter they most wanted to receive.
For units that took losses, start with the casualty record. The National Archives publishes state-level lists of fatal casualties of the Korean and Vietnam wars, drawn from the Defense Casualty Analysis System extract files in Record Group 330. The Korean list covers 28 June 1950 to 10 March 1954 and the Vietnam list 8 June 1956 to 28 May 2006, and each entry carries name, branch, rank or rate, birth date, home-of-record city and county, the incident or death date, and whether remains were recovered. Two cautions the Archives itself supplies: the data was extracted as of 29 April 2008, and in the Korean file most Army records show “Unknown” in the home-of-record city field, so do not read a blank as a discrepancy. Where the remains-recovered field says they were not, the search moves to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, the Defense Department organization responsible for accounting for missing personnel, and to the family rather than to a records office.
For deaths after service – which is most of them – the veteran-specific tool is the Department of Veterans Affairs Nationwide Gravesite Locator. It covers burials in VA national cemeteries, state veterans cemeteries, other military and Department of the Interior cemeteries, and veterans in private cemeteries where the grave is marked with a government marker. Read that qualifier carefully, along with the limitation the department publishes beside it: the private-cemetery information was gathered in order to furnish those markers, and there is no data for private burials before 1997. A name absent from the locator is not evidence that a man is alive. It may only mean the family bought their own headstone. Where the locator comes up short there is a burial location request by mail to the National Cemetery Administration in Washington, which asks for the full name including alternate spellings, date and place of birth, date and place of death, the state of entry to active duty and the branch, and takes roughly four weeks. That same VA page points to Arlington National Cemetery for burials there and to the American Battle Monuments Commission for the overseas cemeteries, and those are the right doors for those two categories.
Round it out with the ordinary sources, which on a bulk list are often faster than the official ones: published obituaries, funeral home notices, and the state vital records office in the state where the man last lived. Our guide to establishing whether someone has died works through those in order and through the traps, of which the biggest is a common name producing a confident false positive. Before you write a condolence letter to the wrong family, confirm on two independent sources – and where the roster is large enough that this stops being practical by hand, it is exactly the sort of bulk check we run as a matter of routine.
Six Things a Roster Does Every Single Time
None of these are exotic. Every organizer meets all six, usually in the first fortnight, and knowing them in advance is most of the skill.
The roster is written in nicknames
Half the list is Doc, Tiny, Smitty and a man everyone calls by the town he came from. Those are unsearchable. Morning reports and unit rosters are where a nickname becomes a legal name, and it is the main reason to bother with them at all.
Four men share a surname
On a common name, the roster itself is your disambiguator: a service number, a middle initial, a home state, an approximate birth year. Supply those up front and the false-match problem largely dissolves. Supply only a surname and it does not.
The women on the list changed names
Any unit with women in it, and any list that includes spouses, carries name changes at marriage and sometimes at divorce. A search on the service-era name returns nothing while the person is perfectly findable under the current one.
The last address is thirty years old
An address that was good when the newsletter still went out tells you where to start, not where to send. It is still worth having: an old address anchors an address history and is frequently what separates your man from his namesake.
Somebody moved abroad or into care
Two categories go quiet in US records for opposite reasons. A man who retired overseas leaves the domestic trail entirely; a man in assisted living or memory care may have a family member handling all his mail. Neither is a dead end, but neither is a keyboard problem.
One name comes back and says no
You will find somebody who does not want the letter, and you should treat that as a completed search rather than a failed one. Log it, tell the committee not to try again through another channel, and take the name off the mailing list for good.
From a Roster to a Set of Confirmed Addresses
What handing us a list actually looks like, in the order it happens.
You send the list as it stands
Typed, scanned, or photographed off a wall in somebody’s den. Include every fragment beside each name – service number, middle initial, home state, rank, an address from any year – because on a bulk list those fragments are what stop us returning the wrong man.
We sort it before we search it
Names split into the easy, the ambiguous and the dead ends, and we tell you which is which before any real work runs. On most rosters a large share resolves quickly and a stubborn minority consumes the effort, so you get to decide where the budget goes rather than discovering it afterward.
We check for deaths first
Deceased names come back flagged and separated, with what we relied on, so nothing goes into a mail merge that should be going to a family instead. This runs before the address work rather than after it, because the order matters to the person receiving the envelope.
You get addresses with their sourcing
Each result arrives with what it rests on and how confident we are, plus the ones we could not resolve and why. You write the letters. We do not contact anybody on your list, announce your reunion, or put ourselves between you and the people you served with.
The Requests We Turn Down, and Why a Reunion Attracts Them
A unit roster is a warm, sympathetic reason to be looking for a long list of people, which is exactly what makes it useful cover.
Take the difficult one first, because it is the one this page exists to say. Some veterans left the unit network deliberately and are entitled to stay left. A person may have walked away from everything connected to those years and built a life that works, and that is a decision rather than a symptom – people are allowed to close a chapter without owing anyone an explanation, and treating a quiet man as damaged is both wrong and rude. There are also specific and serious reasons somebody stays off a roster: a person who was assaulted during service may have gone to considerable trouble to be unreachable by the people who were there, and a reunion mailing is precisely the thing they arranged their life to avoid. We will not help anyone route around that, and we would rather a committee lost a name than a survivor lost the distance they built. If you get a reply asking to be left alone, that is the end of it – not a softer approach later through a cousin.
Then the request we decline outright, whatever the wrapping. Where somebody is looking for a person who went quiet to get away from them – after a protective order, a separation, a report to the police, a stay in a shelter, or a move that was deliberately not shared – we do not take the work, and “I am organizing the reunion” does not change that. It is a good cover story precisely because it is such a normal thing to want. So a request to locate one particular individual, dressed as roster work, gets more scrutiny at intake rather than less, and we would sooner turn away a genuine organizer than hand an address to the one person it puts somebody in danger of. If you are the person who has gone quiet and you believe you are being looked for, speak to a victim-services advocate or to the court that issued your order about your state’s Address Confidentiality Program – and take it as settled that no legitimate research firm should be helping anybody work around it.
We are a skip tracing and public-records research firm, we run no surveillance, and we do not knock on doors on your behalf.. Neither do we claim any relationship with the Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Archives or any branch of the armed forces, and you should be wary of anybody who does. . No one on this team telephones a records office, a nursing home, a family member or a veterans post pretending to be somebody they are not in order to shake an address loose, and we will not coach you through doing it either – which matters on this topic because impersonating a federal official or a service member in order to obtain something is a criminal matter, not a grey area. Nor do we reach private financial contents: no balances, no statements, no account histories, none of which anybody can lawfully obtain about a stranger.
Every search runs on a stated, lawful purpose, and we ask what yours is before starting rather than after you have paid. Where a source is regulated – driver and vehicle records under the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, financial identifiers under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act – we use it only where a permissible use genuinely applies and we record which one it was. We are not a consumer reporting agency, and what we produce is not a consumer report under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. It may not be used to decide employment, credit, insurance, housing, a professional license or a government benefit; those decisions need a consumer reporting agency and the disclosure, authorization and adverse-action steps the statute builds around them. That comes up here more than you would think, because reunion committees overlap with veterans posts and employers, and the answer is the same either way: if that is the decision you are making, we will tell you so and decline.
Everything on this page is general information rather than legal advice, and two areas deserve a professional instead of a web page. Records access rules change, and the dates and fees quoted here come from the Archives’ own published guidance on the day this was reviewed – confirm them with the agency before you rely on them. And where a reunion crosses into an estate, a benefits claim, or the affairs of a veteran who has died, that is a lawyer’s question in the relevant state. If you want to understand how any address we return was arrived at, our note on how an address gets verified rather than merely found shows the checks, because you should be able to weigh the work rather than take our word for it.
The People Who Organize These and What They Are Holding
Six versions of the same conversation, and the starting material is different every time.
Association secretaries
A mailing list going stale faster each year, and returned mail nobody has chased.
Ship reunion committees
A crew list by division, and a records question the Army guidance does not answer.
The last one still going
One veteran with a fading list, doing this himself because nobody else will.
Unit historians
Deep files on the outfit, gaps where the living people should be.
A widow finishing his list
Her husband’s roster, his handwriting on it, and a promise she means to keep.
Chaplains and post officers
Assembling a memorial service rather than a party, on a much shorter clock.
What unites them is that the list came from somewhere real – a drawer, a newsletter, a wall – and everybody on it was known personally to somebody still living. That is a better starting position than most searches ever have, and it is worth remembering on the evening when the returned mail comes back.
What We Will and Will Not Say About a Name on Your List
We will not tell you a roster can be cleared in full, because on any list of this kind some names cannot be resolved through any lawful record and saying otherwise would be a sale rather than an answer. What we will do is sort your list honestly before charging for it, flag the deceased separately and first, and show the sourcing behind every address so you can weigh it yourself. Where a name will not resolve, you get told that plainly instead of receiving a confident guess that sends a letter to a stranger’s house.
Questions From the Person Holding the List
How do I find people I served with when I have the whole roster?
Do not start with the names. Establish first whether the unit has an association, a reunion group or a historian, because any of those may already hold a maintained mailing list covering much of your roster, and an hour spent on that outranks a week of individual searching. Only then work the names, and sort them before you search them: the common surnames, the women who changed names and the men with nothing but a nickname all need different handling.
Can I get a list of everyone who was in my unit?
Something close to it, for the right eras. Morning reports and unit rosters record who was present for duty day by day, by name, and reading across a range of dates rebuilds the roster. The National Archives holds Army morning reports and unit rosters, and all Air Force morning reports, at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. What you will not get is a modern list with contact details attached; these are historical documents, not a directory.
What is a morning report, and can I just order one by mail?
A morning report is the daily record a unit clerk kept of who was present, sick, wounded, transferred, promoted or lost. Whether you can order one depends on its date, and the answer is counter-intuitive. Army reports and rosters from 1912 to 1968, and all Air Force morning reports, are archival, and the Archives states that written requests for archival morning reports and unit rosters are not accepted – you visit the Archival Research Room in St. Louis or hire an independent researcher. Army records from 1969 to 1974 are non-archival and can be requested in writing, signed in cursive and dated within the last year.
Will the National Archives give me a fellow veteran’s address?
No. A veteran’s own personnel file becomes archival and open to the public sixty-two years after separation, so for anything more recent you are, in the Archives’ own framing, a member of the general public with no relation – and it will release only limited information without the veteran’s consent or that of next of kin. Even an archival file is a service history rather than a current address. Having served in the same company gives you no standing here, and that is the Privacy Act working as intended.
How do I find out whether someone on the roster has died?
Check before you mail, not after. For wartime losses, the National Archives publishes state-level fatal casualty lists for the Korean and Vietnam wars drawn from Defense Casualty Analysis System extract files. For deaths after service, the Department of Veterans Affairs Nationwide Gravesite Locator covers national and state veterans cemeteries and private-cemetery graves marked with a government marker – with no private-cemetery data before 1997, so an absent name proves nothing. Published obituaries and state vital records fill the rest, and a common name should always be confirmed on two independent sources.
Is there a free way to do all of this?
A good deal of it, yes, and you should exhaust the free routes first. Unit associations and historians cost nothing, reviewing an archival record in the Archival Research Room carries no fee, and the casualty lists and gravesite locator are public. The costs appear where you cannot travel to St. Louis, where a non-archival search fee applies, and where a name simply will not resolve without paid record access. On a roster of any size the honest split is that most of the work is free and the last stubborn fraction is not.
Someone on the list does not want to be found. What then?
You stop, and you take the name off the list rather than trying again through a relative or a mutual friend. People leave a unit network for reasons that are entirely theirs, including reasons nobody on the committee will ever be told, and a person who has arranged to be unreachable by those years has the right to stay that way. We decline work aimed at reaching someone who has deliberately gone quiet from the person asking, and a request to locate one particular individual dressed up as roster work gets more scrutiny at intake, not less.
What can you actually do with a list of ninety names?
We take the list as it stands, sort it into the resolvable, the ambiguous and the dead ends before charging for the work, run the death check first so nothing wrong goes into a mail merge, and return current addresses with the sourcing behind each one. With a solid starting point the first tranche typically comes back within 24 hours. What we do not do is file your records requests, contact anybody on your behalf, or claim any affiliation with the Archives or the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Have the Roster, Missing the Addresses?
Send the list exactly as it is – typed, scanned, or photographed off a page somebody has kept for fifty years – and we will tell you what is workable before you spend anything. Or put the reunion to our team and we will say honestly which parts of it you can do yourself for nothing.
Send us the roster
