Draft Registration Cards: Who Is In Them, and Who Is Not
Twice in the twentieth century the federal government wrote down almost every man of a given age in the country, whether or not he ever wore a uniform. That near-total coverage inside a fixed band of birth years is the whole reason these cards are worth your time — and it is also the reason a man’s absence from them can be read, carefully, as evidence. This page is organized around coverage: which men were required to register, which were never asked, whose cards were later destroyed, and what a card can and cannot support once you find one.
Before you open a search box
These are not military records and they never were. The National Archives puts it flatly: not all the men who registered went on to serve, not all the men who served had registered, and the cards “contain no information about an individual’s military service.” What they contain instead is a home address, an employer, a physical description, and — on most of the forms — the name and address of somebody else. The coverage is the point. Registration reached nearly every man in a defined birth-year band, so unlike almost any other record of that period, these files let you reason about who is not there. But the bands are hard edges, not soft ones. A man three months too old on one registration day is simply absent until the next one. And whole populations were never in scope. No woman ever registered. Eight states’ Fourth Registration cards were destroyed. Men born between March 29, 1957 and December 31, 1959 were never required to register at all. Knowing which kind of absence you are looking at is most of the skill.
Watch: what registration actually covered
The three World War I registrations, the six of World War II, and the differences between the four card formats that decide what your man’s card can tell you.
Play the records walkthrough
Nearly Every Man, Inside a Birth-Year Band
Two national sweeps, nine separate registrations, and the exact edges of who was caught by each one.
The National Archives describes World War I registration in a sentence most researchers skim past: “Nearly all men between the ages of 18-45 registered during the years the draft was implemented, about 23% of the U.S. population.” Read it again as a coverage statement rather than a history fact. Twenty-three percent of the whole population is an enormous proportion once you remember that women and boys are inside that denominator and outside the registration requirement entirely. Its reference page on the cards gives the total: approximately 24,000,000 cards.
That is an unusual thing for a record set to be. Vital registration was patchy and state-run in 1917. City directories covered householders in towns big enough to have a publisher. The decennial census was ten years wide. Draft registration, by contrast, happened on named days, under federal compulsion, with a local board in every county and a legal duty attached to showing up.
World War I: three registration days, three different age brackets
Congress passed the Selective Service Act on May 18, 1917, and the Archives records three registrations under it. June 5, 1917 took all men aged 21 through 31. June 5, 1918 took only those who had reached 21 since the previous year, with a supplemental sitting on August 24, 1918 for men who turned 21 after that June date; the Archives counts the supplemental as part of the second registration. Then September 12, 1918 threw the net far wider, covering men aged 18 through 45.
Two consequences fall straight out of those dates, and they are the ones people get wrong. First, a man aged 35 in the summer of 1917 was not evading anything by being absent from the first registration — he was simply not eligible to register, and he does not appear until September 1918. Second, the same man may appear more than once, on different forms, at different addresses, fifteen months apart. A second card is not a duplicate. It is a second data point.
The Archives’ printed reference report on the series adds a detail worth holding onto: the system “required all men, regardless of citizenship, between the ages of 18 and 45 to register.” Non-citizens registered. So did men who had filed a declaration of intention and men who had not. The card formats carry check boxes for each status, which means these files reach immigrant men who appear in almost nothing else from that decade.
World War II: six registrations, and a national headcount that was never about soldiers
The Selective Training and Service Act of September 16, 1940 created the modern Selective Service System, and the Archives at St. Louis records that six draft registrations were held during the war. Its holdings page for Selective Service records divides what survives into two groups by birth date: the Fourth Registration group, for men born from April 28, 1877 to February 16, 1897, and everybody else, born from February 17, 1897 to July 31, 1927. Together, the era’s cards run to nearly 38 million for the years 1940 to 1947, filed as Record Group 147.
The Fourth Registration is the one that surprises people, and it deserves its own paragraph because it is so often misdescribed. Held on April 27, 1942, it is known as the “Old Man’s Registration.” The Archives is explicit about what it was for: it “collected information on the industrial capacity and skills of men born between April 27, 1877, and February 16, 1897,” and it “was not intended to be used for military service, but to provide a complete inventory of manpower resources in the United States that could be used for national service.” Nobody in it was going to be drafted. It was a census of working men, conducted by the draft apparatus because the draft apparatus was the only thing that could reach everybody at once.
One footnote on precision, because the Archives is not internally consistent here. Its reference report on the Fourth Registration gives the earliest birth date as April 27, 1877, while the St. Louis holdings page and the agency’s own data-collection sheet for the form both say April 28, 1877. The difference is one day. We use April 28 because two of the three sources say so, and we flag it rather than quietly picking one, since a man born in that exact week is precisely the kind of edge case a coverage argument has to handle honestly.
The overlap that produces two cards for one man
Here is the single most useful sentence on the St. Louis page, and it appears on essentially none of the guides that rank for this subject: “as there is overlap in the WWI and WWII Selective Service registration birth years (1877 to 1900), some men may have registered twice and have both WWI and WWII draft records.”
Think about what that means operationally. A man born in, say, 1894 could have filled out a card in his early twenties and another one at 48, roughly a quarter of a century apart. You get two addresses, two employers, two physical descriptions taken by two different registrars, and on most versions of the form two named third parties. For anyone reconstructing a life, that pair is worth more than either card alone, because the gap between them is where the migration, the marriage and the change of trade all happened.
Four Forms, Four Different Sets of Questions
The single biggest research error on this subject is treating “the draft card” as one document. It is at least four.
Guides to this record set almost always print one field list, as though every registrant answered the same questions. He did not. The Archives states that the World War I forms carried between ten and twelve questions and that the content “differs somewhat” between them, and its reference report on the card formats prints all three question lists in full. The differences are not cosmetic. The field most people come here for — a named relative with an address — does not exist on the first form at all. Two of the Archives’ own figures do not agree with each other across those two publications, and rather than quietly picking the one that reads better we have set both disagreements out immediately below the table.
| Form | Who filled it in | Fields that help you locate a person | What it does not carry |
|---|---|---|---|
| Card A, 12 questions June 5, 1917 | Men aged 21 to 31; the Archives gives their birth years as 1886 to 1896. | Home address. Date and place of birth. Present trade or occupation, plus “By whom employed? Where employed?” A dependency question naming whether a father, mother, wife, child under 12 or young sibling relied on him. Prior military service, with rank, branch, years and nation or state. Any claim of exemption. | No nearest-relative field. The dependency question tells you a relationship existed; it does not give you a name and an address. |
| Card B, 10 questions June 5 and August 24, 1918 | Men who reached 21 after the first registration. | Home address. Date and place of birth. Employer’s name and place of employment. Father’s birthplace — asked on this form only. And the first appearance of “Name of nearest relative. Address of nearest relative.” | Occupation as a free-text trade, prior service, and any exemption claim. It is the shortest of the three. |
| Card C, 20 questions September 12, 1918 | Men aged 18 through 45. That age range is the reliable figure and it is the one to work from; the Archives also prints a birth-year range for this registration that cannot be reconciled with it, which we set out under the table.Widest sweep | Permanent home address to street number, city, county and state. Age and date of birth. Present occupation, employer’s name and place of employment as three separate items. Nearest relative’s name and address as items 19 and 20. A registrar’s description of height, build, eye and hair color, and a question on whether the man had lost an arm, leg, hand or eye. | Father’s birthplace, dropped after Card B. Also no dependency question and no exemption claim. |
| D.S.S. Form 1, revised April 1, 1942 Fourth Registration | Men born on or after April 28, 1877 and on or before February 16, 1897. | Residence to number and street, which the form states in capitals “WILL DETERMINE LOCAL BOARD JURISDICTION.” A separate mailing address if different. A telephone number. Employer’s name and address, and place of employment as a separate item. And item 7: “Name and Address of Person Who Will Always Know Your Address.” | Citizenship, father’s birthplace, occupation as a trade, and any dependency or exemption question. |
Two places where the Archives disagrees with itself about these forms
The first is the count. The genealogy page says the World War I forms carried between ten and twelve questions. The reference report on the card formats prints Card A at twelve, Card B at ten and Card C at twenty, and the twenty-item list is reproduced there in full, numbered. Both figures are the Archives’. We have used its own numbering in the table because it is the version you can check item by item against a card in front of you, and we are flagging the ten-to-twelve statement rather than deleting it, because a reader who finds that sentence on the Archives’ site is entitled to know we saw it too.
The second is sharper, because it cannot be true. The reference report describes the third registration as open to “all males between the ages of 18 and 45; born 1886–1900.” Those two halves contradict each other. The third registration was held on September 12, 1918, and a man born in 1886 was thirty-two years old that day, not forty-five. A birth range starting in 1886 cannot describe a cohort whose oldest men were forty-five. The same report’s line for Card A — ages 21 to 31, born 1886 to 1896 — is internally consistent for June 1917, which is why we have kept it.
So work from the ages, not from the birth years. Two separate Archives pages agree that the September 1918 registration took men aged 18 through 45, and that is the figure the coverage argument on this page rests on: it is what puts a man who was thirty-five in the summer of 1917 into the third registration and nowhere earlier. We are deliberately not publishing a corrected birth range in its place. We could work one out from the registration date, and so can you, but it would be our arithmetic wearing the Archives’ authority, and on a page about what a record does and does not prove that is not a trade worth making.
Item 7 is the field this whole subject turns on
Read that Fourth Registration heading again as a piece of design. In the spring of 1942 the federal government asked an entire cohort of middle-aged men to nominate, in writing, one person who could always be relied on to know where they were. Not a next of kin. Not an emergency contact in the medical sense. A person who would always know your address. The Archives reproduces the blank form as a data-collection sheet, and item 7 sits there in plain type between the birthplace and the employer.
That is, functionally, a locating record. It is the same question a records researcher asks in the first ten minutes of a modern file, asked once of an entire cohort and preserved by a federal agency for eighty years. The World War I equivalent, “nearest relative,” is narrower and appears only on the last two of the three forms, which the Archives states directly in its list of what the cards contain.
What the physical description is actually for
Every version of the form ends with a registrar’s report. Card C asked for height in three bands, build in three bands, eye and hair color, and any lost limb or eye. The 1942 form asked for height, weight, race, complexion, hair, eyes and, in its own words, “other obvious physical characteristics that will aid in identification.” That last phrase tells you the purpose without ambiguity: the description was there so a local board could tell one Michael Sullivan from another Michael Sullivan on the same street.
Use it the same way. In a county with four men of the same name and near-identical ages, the descriptions are frequently the only thing that separates them, and a distinguishing mark recorded by a registrar in 1918 is very often repeated on a later record in a different series. Where the surname itself is the obstacle rather than the man, the separate problem of a name that changed after the record was made has its own methods and they run in the other direction.
A Registration Card Is Not a Service Record
Two record sets, two custodians, two entirely different things proved. Confusing them costs people months.
The Archives states the distinction more bluntly than any commercial guide dares to: not all of the men who registered for the draft actually served in the military, and not all men who served in the military registered for the draft. “Moreover these are not military service records. They end when an individual reports to the army training camp. They contain no information about an individual’s military service.”
Three practical rules follow, and they are worth learning before you order anything.
A card does not prove service. If a family story says a great-grandfather fought in France and the only evidence is a registration card, the evidence does not say that. It says he was required to register and did. Cards exist for about 23 percent of everyone alive in the United States in 1918; the number of men who actually served is a far smaller set than that.
The absence of a card does not disprove service. Volunteers and men already in uniform on a registration day sit outside the registration requirement, so a serving soldier can be missing from a set that caught his civilian neighbors.
The card stops at the camp gate. Everything about what happened after that — unit, dates, rank, discharge — belongs to a different series held by a different part of the National Archives, requested a different way. That is a separate piece of work with its own rules, and if that is what you actually need, a page about draft registration is the wrong page.
There is a middle document worth knowing about. For men who registered before 1976, the Archives at St. Louis holds two things and only two: the Draft Registration Card, catalogued as SSS Form 1, and the Classification History, SSS Form 102. The Form 102 records classification and the date the notice was mailed, any date of appeal to the board, the date and result of an armed forces physical examination, entry into active duty or into civilian work in lieu of induction, and the date of separation. So the classification record, not the registration card, is where you find out what the board actually decided about a man. NARA’s published mailed-request fee is seven dollars for the registration card and twenty-seven dollars for the classification history, which includes the card.
The rest is gone. The Archives states that all other individual draftee files from that period were destroyed by the Selective Service System in 1978 under approved retention schedules — physical examination and test results, medical letters, laboratory work. Those documents do not exist to be found, and no researcher, however diligent, is going to produce one.
Six Reasons a Man Is Not in the Cards
Only one of them is about him. The other five are about the record set.
Near-complete coverage is only useful if you know exactly where it stops. Every one of the following is a documented boundary, not a search failure, and each one produces a blank result that looks identical to the others.
He was the wrong age on the day
Registration happened on fixed dates with hard brackets. A man of 32 in June 1917 or 46 in September 1918 falls outside both windows. The gap is arithmetic, and it is closed by checking the next registration rather than by searching harder.
His state’s cards were destroyed
Fourth Registration cards no longer exist for Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Maine, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina or Tennessee. Eight states, one entire registration, gone. A Georgia man of the right age in 1942 will never be found, and that is not a comment on him.
He was born in the registration gap
Men born from March 29, 1957 through December 31, 1959 were never required to register, because the program was suspended when they reached 18. There is no card for them because there was no duty. Three birth years, nationwide, with nothing behind them.
He was born in 1960 or later
The Archives holds Selective Service records for men born before 1960. Everything from January 1, 1960 onward stays with the Selective Service System itself. Same subject, different custodian, different request route, and a live agency rather than an archive.
The board you searched was the wrong one
Cards were filed by state, then by county or city, then by local board, then alphabetically. New York City alone had 189 local boards. In a big city, a correct name searched against the wrong board returns nothing and looks exactly like absence.
She was never eligible in the first place
No woman ever registered. Not in 1917, not in 1942, not since. Every card in every one of these series belongs to a man, so the record set can never be searched for a woman directly — only for the men who named her.
The most valuable thing in the record set, for finding women
That last boundary has a way through it, and it is the reason this record set matters far beyond male lines. Women appear in these files constantly — as the nearest relative on a 1918 card, as the person who would always know a man’s address in 1942, occasionally as the employer. A mother, a wife, a widowed sister keeping house for a bachelor brother: each of them gets a name and a street address recorded by a federal registrar on a dated day, in a series that was never indexed with them in mind.
So the technique is indirect and it is reliable. You do not search for the woman. You search for every man who might plausibly have named her, read the relative fields, and work backward. This is how a married daughter under a surname the family had lost turns up in a record about her brother, and it is a standard move in an heirship file where a class of beneficiaries has to be identified and documented rather than guessed at.
Where a search stalls in a large city
The urban problem is worth setting out precisely, because it is the most common practical failure. The National Archives’ ordering guidance for these cards says that to locate one it needs the registrant’s first and last name plus the city, county and state of residence at the time of registration — and that for a specific list of places, a street address or a community name is additionally required. The list names Los Angeles and San Francisco; New Orleans; Bergen County, Jersey City and Newark; Providence; Washington; Baltimore; Albany, Buffalo, all five boroughs of New York City, Rochester and Syracuse; Atlanta; Chicago; Indianapolis; Louisville; the Boston area; Minneapolis and St. Paul; Kansas City and St. Louis; Cincinnati; Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and every Pennsylvania county with a community name attached; and Milwaukee.
Underneath that list is a structure. Local boards were created for each county or similar subdivision, and additionally for roughly every 30,000 people in any city or county above that size, which is why urban filing fragments so badly. There were 4,648 local boards across 52 states and territories, each handling an average of about 5,000 registrants. If your man lived in one of those cities, the practical first step is not a better name search. It is finding a city directory entry that puts him on a particular street in that year. The Archives also filmed a set of boundary maps for the draft-board areas of selected cities and counties, published as M1860 in a single roll, precisely because this problem was foreseeable.
Working Forward From a Card to a Living Person
Four stages. The first two are archival, the last two are not, and the boundary between them is where most of the caution lives.
Fix which registration he belongs to
From an approximate birth year, work out which of the nine registrations he was eligible for and which form he would have completed. That decides in advance whether the card can carry a nearest relative at all, and it stops a search running against a series he was never in.
Resolve the place before searching the name
State, then county or city, then local board. In a small county the name and county are enough. In any of the cities the Archives lists, we find a street address in a directory from within a year or two of the registration first, because the board is a function of where he slept.
Harvest the third parties, not just the man
The nearest relative, the person who would always know his address, and the employer are each a separate research thread with a name and a street. In practice these three lines outperform the registrant’s own address, because a household moves and a family name persists.
Cross the century deliberately, with a lawful purpose on file
Only now does present-day work begin, and it begins from named descendants rather than from the registrant. Where a locate is warranted and a lawful purpose is stated, a full name and a reasonable starting point usually produce a result within 24 hours.
Stage four is where honesty matters more than technique. An address written on a card in 1918 or 1942 is a research lead, not a location. The man who wrote it is almost certainly dead; the building may not exist; the street may have been renumbered or absorbed. What the address does is anchor a family to a place at a date, which lets you pick up the county records that follow — probate, deeds, cemetery registers, later directories — and follow the line forward to people who are alive. That forward work is ordinary records-based locate practice, and it has nothing to do with the draft card except that the card told you where to start.
Two adjacent problems come up often enough in this work to name. Where the trail runs through a relative who may have died decades ago and nobody in the family is certain, establishing that fact is its own documented process rather than an assumption to build on. And where a card names a grandparent whose later life the family lost track of entirely, the search for a grandparent who dropped out of contact follows a different route again, because the last known address is recent enough to still be worth probing.
The Rules We Work Under Here
Historical paper that ends in a living person’s front door needs its limits stated at the top of the file, not the bottom.
This is a skip tracing and public records research firm, and no one working on it is a licensed private investigator. That is not something we keep quiet about; it gets said to clients and it gets said to archivists before anybody thinks to ask. The work is reading records, putting requests in writing over our own signature, and naming whoever instructed us whenever the question arises. No file starts without a lawful purpose entered against it before the first search runs — an estate identifying its heirs, a probate court wanting evidence that a diligent search was made, a lineage application that needs one generation proved, a family closing a gap it did not choose. That precondition is the job rather than the paperwork around it. Wanting to know where a stranger lives fails it, and we would sooner say so in the opening email than three weeks in.
We do not pretext. Nobody here rings the National Archives in the character of a grandson, leaves a helpful misunderstanding standing where it is, or dresses up who is footing the bill so that a file gets opened. The temptation is real on this subject, because a warm family story opens doors that a flat research request does not. We refuse it for the practical reason as much as the principled one: an archivist who knows exactly what we are doing gives us better material, and one who has been played warns the next caller. Bank material is out of bounds on the same reasoning. What sits inside a private account — the balance, the statement, the account number — is not something this firm chases, because in practice the way to it runs straight through the impersonation ruled out in the sentences above. Selective Service registration cards are the opposite sort of record: federal, archival, and available to anybody who asks in the ordinary way.
What this research may never be used to decide
People Locator Skip Tracing is not a consumer reporting agency and nothing we produce is a consumer report. So a card, a board number or anything else surfaced here is not material for working out whether to hire somebody, whether to rent to them, what their creditworthiness looks like, how insurance underwriting ought to treat them, or whether a license or a benefit should be granted. Those calls sit inside the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and the Act hands them to screening firms — outfits built to run consent, disclosure, adverse-action notices and a dispute process end to end. We run none of that, and saying so plainly is cheaper than being asked later to pretend otherwise. When an inquiry that opened as family history turns out to be one of those calls, we give it back.
Why this particular record attracts requests we refuse
We decline any file where the person at the end of it appears to have stepped away on purpose. This subject deserves that warning more than most, and it is worth being concrete about why. A registration card is a small identity dossier: date and place of birth, height and build, eye and hair color, distinguishing marks, an employer, and a named relative at a street address. Genealogy is also the most comfortable cover story available for wanting all of that, because it sounds harmless and it is very difficult for an outsider to test. And the relative fields point outward at people who never registered and never consented to anything — which is precisely how a historical record about a dead man becomes a route to a living woman.
So a request that begins in the 1940s and ends with “and I would like her current address” gets more scrutiny at intake from us, not less. If what we hear suggests domestic violence, a protective order, a stalking pattern, a custody dispute being run outside a courtroom, or a relative who has already said in plain terms that they want no contact, we stop the file, and we do not restart it because the second version of the request is worded more carefully. Nobody is owed a relative’s address. People live where they live, and some of them have thought about the distance a great deal harder than the person asking us to close it.
If you are the person who is being looked for, the state Address Confidentiality Program where you live is the right first call, and the National Domestic Violence Hotline is reachable around the clock by phone at 1-800-799-7233 and by text. Where the situation is immediate, the emergency number is 911. Those are the paths we point people down, and we would rather lose the work.
Two variants come up often enough to name plainly. The first is the reunion approach: a match on a surname in a 1918 card, and a wish to appear on a doorstep. We will carry a letter and make it genuinely easy to ignore; we will not supply an address so that a visit can be a surprise. The second involves someone approaching you. Heirship work draws impostors, because a cold call about money you did not know you were owed is disarming by design. Before you agree to anything or sign a fee arrangement, get three items in writing: the deceased person’s full name, the court holding the matter, and the case number. Those three let you check the file yourself in an afternoon, and anyone genuinely working the estate will hand them over without being pushed.
Treat this page as general information about Selective Service records and the archives holding them; it is not legal advice. Whether a registration card establishes a relationship, who stands to inherit, and what a given probate court will accept as evidence that a diligent search was made are all questions for an attorney licensed where the matter sits. Our end of it is finding the document and handing over a citation anybody can check for themselves. Drawing the legal conclusion is somebody else’s job.
Who Sends Us to the Draft Cards
Six recurring instructing parties, wanting six unrelated things from the same drawer of index cards.
Estate and heirship attorneys
Needing a class of descendants named and evidenced to a standard a probate judge will sign off on.
Adoptees tracing a paternal line
Working from a surname and a region toward a man who left almost no other paper behind him.
Naturalization researchers
Using the citizenship boxes on the 1918 forms to date a declaration of intention and find the court that holds it.
Museum and archive collections staff
Attaching a documented identity to a donated object, a photograph or an uncatalogued personal paper.
Biographers and authors
Pinning a subject to an address, an employer and a physical description on a specific dated day.
Fraternal and veterans organization historians
Reconstructing a chapter roll from a period when membership lists were kept badly or not at all.
The adoptees are the group for whom this record set does something nothing else does. A paternal line with no birth certificate, no marriage record and no census entry under the expected name can still surface a card, because registration was compulsory and indifferent to whether a man had otherwise stayed off paper. It is also the group for whom the boundaries above bite hardest, since the person at the end of the line is alive, was not consulted, and may not know the searcher exists. We treat contact in those files as a letter delivered with an easy way to say no, never as an address handed over. The same discipline applies when the search is for someone from an earlier chapter of a person’s own life rather than an ancestor, which is the situation the note on reaching a service friend after decades works through.
Every card we cite comes with the state, the board and the series
A finding leaves this office with the coordinates that let somebody else pull the same card: registration, state, county or city, local board, the registrant’s name as it was actually written, and the microfilm publication or catalog series where the image sits. A negative result is written up as a result: we name the series we read, the boundary that accounts for the blank, and what would have to be true for the card to exist somewhere else. Locate work is billed only when a person is actually located, so a search that ends without one costs nothing.
Questions About Selective Service Registration Cards
Does a draft registration card prove that he served in the military?
No, and this is the single most common misreading of the record. The National Archives states that not all of the men who registered actually served, and not all of the men who served had registered. It goes further: “these are not military service records. They end when an individual reports to the army training camp. They contain no information about an individual’s military service.” A card proves that a man was required to register and did so on a particular day, at a particular address, with a particular employer. Service, unit, rank and discharge live in an entirely different set of records held and requested a different way.
Did every American man really register?
Very nearly, inside the age brackets, and that is what makes the record set unusual. The Archives says “nearly all men between the ages of 18-45 registered” for World War I, amounting to about 24,000,000 cards, roughly 23 percent of the entire United States population in 1918. Its reference report adds that registration was required of all men in that range “regardless of citizenship,” so non-citizens are in there too. But the brackets are hard: each registration had a fixed date and a fixed age range, and a man on the wrong side of one is simply not in that registration. He may well be in the next one.
I know he was the right age, so why can’t I find his card?
Work through five documented possibilities before concluding anything about the man. His state’s Fourth Registration cards may not exist — they were destroyed for Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Maine, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. He may have been born between March 29, 1957 and December 31, 1959, when registration was suspended and nobody was required to register. He may have been born in 1960 or later, in which case the National Archives does not hold his record at all and the Selective Service System does. He may have been searched against the wrong local board, which matters enormously in a big city. Or he may have been outside the age bracket on that particular registration day.
Can I use draft registration cards to find a woman?
Not directly — no woman ever registered under any of these programs, so there is no card in her name to find. Indirectly, they are one of the better tools available. The 1918 forms record a nearest relative by name and address, and the 1942 Fourth Registration form asks for the “Name and Address of Person Who Will Always Know Your Address.” Mothers, wives, sisters and daughters fill those fields in enormous numbers, complete with a street address recorded by a federal registrar on a dated day. The method is to search every man who might plausibly have named her, read the relative field, and work backward from there.
What was the “Old Man’s Draft,” and was anyone actually drafted?
Nobody was. The Fourth Registration, held on April 27, 1942, is the fourth of six wartime registrations and covered men born from April 28, 1877 to February 16, 1897 — men in their mid-forties to mid-sixties. The National Archives is explicit that it “was not intended to be used for military service, but to provide a complete inventory of manpower resources in the United States that could be used for national service.” It was a survey of skills and industrial capacity carried out through the draft machinery. For a researcher it is the richest of all the forms, because it asks for a telephone number, a separate mailing address, an employer, and a permanent personal contact.
Are these records public, and who holds them now?
They are archival federal records and are available in the ordinary way. World War I cards are held as a microfilmed series and can be ordered from the National Archives by mail or online. The original World War II and later cards have been consolidated at the National Archives at St. Louis, which holds Selective Service records for men born from April 28, 1877 through March 28, 1957; the published mailed-request fee is seven dollars for a registration card and twenty-seven dollars for a classification history, which includes the card. Anything for men born on or after January 1, 1960 stays with the Selective Service System rather than the Archives.
He lived in a large city and I cannot work out which draft board he was in. What now?
Get a street address before you search anything else. The Archives says that for certain places a name and city are not enough and a street address or community name is required — among them New York City with all five boroughs, Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Boston, Baltimore, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Orleans, Newark and Jersey City, Louisville, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Kansas City and St. Louis, Providence, Washington, Albany, Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse. New York City alone had 189 local boards. A city directory from within a year or two of the registration is the usual way in, and the Archives also filmed draft-board boundary maps for selected cities and counties as publication M1860.
Can a hundred-year-old address help me find someone who is alive today?
Only as a starting point, and it is important to be straight about that. The registrant himself is almost certainly dead, the building may be gone and the street may have been renumbered. What the card gives you is a family anchored to a place on a dated day, which is what lets the county records that follow — probate, deeds, burial registers, later directories — be searched productively instead of blindly. The present-day locate at the end of that chain is separate work with its own requirements: we need a stated lawful purpose, we identify ourselves and whoever instructed us, and we make it easy for the person to decline contact. With a full name and a reasonable starting point that stage usually comes back within 24 hours. Where the circumstances suggest somebody has deliberately stepped away, we decline the file rather than deliver an address.
Give Us a Name, a Rough Age and a County
Send the surname, an approximate year of birth and wherever you believe he was living, and we will tell you which registrations he was eligible for, which form he would have completed, whether that form carries a named relative, and whether his state’s cards survive at all — before anybody commits to anything. If the answer is that his state’s Fourth Registration cards were burned decades ago and this trail has to begin from a different series entirely, you should hear that on day one rather than after a month of searching. Describe the man and the decade, and you will get back an assessment of which registrations could hold him.
Open a records research file
