In a message dated 7/6/2005 5:58:58 AM US Eastern Standard Time, juliejb@ptd.net writes: I got the feeling that some company employee at the mine may have completed the information as best he knew and grandfather just signed the paper. Hello All I don't believe this was the case at all. 1917 was the FIRST draft the USA had -- and it was serious business at the time. Men (between certain ages) were required to report to the LOCAL DRAFT BOARD, and register. The boards were staffed with people who were there specifically to conduct these registrations. They completed the forms upon interviews with the registrants, and then the form was signed and dated by the registrant. As in all cases, some staffers are more careful than others, some draft boards would have been much busier than others, and the fact is, many immigrants lied as best they could to avoid military service. In small towns, the staffers were local and knew the registrants, making it more difficult to obscure the truth. In big cities, it was easier. WWI had been raging in Europe for over 2 years by the time the USA instituted this draft -- newspapers were filled with current events just as they are today. It was pretty obvious what was going on, and many people did not want to be conscripted into the military--which was one of the reasons for many having left the "old country" to begin with. My grandfather was a highly trained gunsmith -- yet he reported he was a "shop worker" as his occupation on his draft registration. True, he did work in a shop -- but not revealing that he was a gunsmith is a pretty obvious motivation to avoid military service. You can bet that men talked about this 'new' draft thing with one another, and having some information about the requirements, and about who would be deferred, or classified as non-eligible, (newspapers again!) some of these would do their best to try and avoid being classified as "eligible". Maybe I was just lucky, but having already researched the WWI Draft Registrations for my family, (8 men in all), I found them to be very accurate overall -- a lot of phonetic spelling on the "place where born" but otherwise, a very good source of family history information. Regards to all Linda