If there are any military experts out there, can you please tell me if a man was living in Sumter Co, FL, registered with the Civilian Draft, and has a very common name, ie: James Jones, is there anyway to find out what unit he was assigned to so I can get his records? Thank you, Brenda

Brenda... There is no reason to suppose automatically that someone who registered for the draft in W.W.I actually served. Almost all men who were of an age required to register did, but only a certain (relatively small) percentage were drafted. Our military involvement in W.W.I was very small compared with W.W.II. For example, my maternal grandfather registered for the draft in Immokalee, Florida, but took his family home to Whigham, Georgia, then himself went to somewhere near, I think it was Dothan, Alabama, where he took a job in a munitions plant, to assure that he did not get drafted. I knew all of that except the part about Immokalee from oral history. I don't know what he was doing in Immokalee. So far as I knew he had always lived in Fort Myers. So my first question would be: Do you know through oral history that the man in question actually served? If he did, he may have filed his discharge record at the courthouse in the county he returned to after military service. There is no requirement that that be done, but it was recommended practice and many did. If you're like me though, you might not know for sure where that might be. If he did serve there is a pretty fair chance that his grave was marked with a VA gravestone. At least some of those show the unit that the veteran served in, and my impression is that showing such information was more common on W.W.I veterans' stones. In my father's brother's case (he died on active duty between the wars) I found state service officer records showing his military ID number in my grandmother's Bible. If I had not found that, there would have been nothing. Most of the records of military service from before W.W.I to after W.W.II were burned in an enormous fire in 1973 (see: http://www.archives.gov/facilities/mo/st_louis/military_personnel_records/fire_1973.html ) that lasted for days, at the federal records center in St. Louis. I asked the records center for copies of what they had based on that service number and instead was requested by them to provide what I had so that they could "reconstruct" my uncle's personnel record from it. So, before I made the request they had nothing... and afterwards they had what I provided to them, from my grandmother's Bible. A copy of the discharge papers of many veterans... such as my father who was a W.W.II Army vet... had been forwarded to the VA and were reconstructed from VA files. But those reconstructed records will have only the discharge record... not the full record. It will show the last unit assigned to but will not note any before that. You really need the man's service number. Failing that, knowing his unit might help. Not knowing either... I don't know if there is any chance at all... and there is a huge probability that his record was destroyed anyway. RW Brenda Antal wrote: >If there are any military experts out there, can you please tell me if a man >was living in Sumter Co, FL, registered with the Civilian Draft, and has a >very common name, ie: James Jones, is there anyway to find out what unit he >was assigned to so I can get his records? >