National Archives to soon offer more World War II military documents online

Researchers will soon have digital access to morning reports from Army units during the final year of World War II, providing descriptions of unit locations, award nominations and soldier personnel movements.

The records being transferred to digital format include tens of thousands of morning reports sent in 1945, which now exist on microfilm at the National Archives in St. Louis, Missouri, and focus on personnel updates at the company, battalion and brigade levels. The project, which also includes more than a decade of postwar draft registration cards, was announced this year as part of a partnership with Ancestry, a private genealogical research company. All of the records will be publicly available and were not previously available online.

“These records are among our most popular collections. They are widely used locally and in demand around the world,” said Theresa Fitzgerald, director of the personnel records division of the National Archives in St. Louis. “They have become an important part of reconstruction and military research.”

Much of this value comes from the detailed information available on personnel updates and the physical location of the unit at the time the report was written. This value increased after a 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center destroyed more than 16 million military personnel records from 1912 to 1964, making it difficult for some veterans and their families to prove their service history to receive benefits.

According to the National Archives, more than 100,000 microfilms of morning reports were saved from the burning building.

With these reports, researchers can track a veteran from the date he or she joined a particular unit to the date he or she left, Fitzgerald said.

“If they changed units, which was very common, it was noted in the morning reports, and you stopped your search with that unit and moved on to the new one,” she said.

Some even describe smaller battles that took place or notes on the weather, geographic environment, wildlife encounters, or they list the towns the troops passed through.

The unit clerk would type the reports on long strips of paper and send them in batches to the Army, she explained. The Army used this type of morning report until 1974, when it switched to a system of personal data sheets. The Navy and Marine Corps kept similar records, but in large logs rather than individual documents.

Once this series of documents is transferred to a digital format, complete sets of morning reports from 1944 to 1946 will be available online, said Quinton Atkinson, senior director of global content acquisition for Ancestry, which has partnered with the National Archives to transfer documents since 2008.

“These reports are significant both for their specificity and for the broader historical context in which they were created,” he said.

The second piece of military records included in Ancestry’s latest partnership includes nearly 10 million draft registration cards from 1948 to 1959. These cards are another popular collection because each provides the applicant’s basic information along with an address, occupation, basic physical description and the person’s chosen beneficiary.

“These are pretty common situations,” Fitzgerald said. “But I’ve found over the years that the most interesting situations tend to happen when you meet famous people or not-so-famous people.”

Once the process is complete, the records will be accessible through the National Archives website archives.gov.

Above: An example of recruitment records from more than a decade that will soon be available online through a partnership between the National Archives and the Ancestry company. The records can help researchers, especially genealogists, because they include a man’s address, occupation, marital status and sometimes a physical description. Photo courtesy of the National Archives.