Military Records online

[kevin]

Ancestry.com now has military records online available for FREE viewing, yea free! All you have to do is enter a name and email address and thats it.

I tried it out, first search brought up my great grandpa's ww1 draft card. no one in my family ever knew what he did over in germany but we knew he was in the army. Now i know he was a private in the infantry for two years.

I also recently found his enemy alien papers with fingerprints, picture and other information telling how he came here etc. From that i found the manifest and picture of the ship and found he had 40 dollars and a trunk when he came over.

[RandyCOG3]

It IS pretty cool, but it's only free through June 6 (D-Day).
Here's an article about it:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/05/24/tech/main2845553.shtml

I found my father's father's WWI draft registration, which is pretty cool. He died before my parents ever met, so I've had practically zero "connection" with him, just one or two old photographs I've seen, but don't have. I noticed that the last name of his employer was "Radford"... which was my uncle's middle name. Never knew where THAT came from, until now.

RandyCOG3

[kevin]

if he was a foreign born immigrant he would have had to fill out enemy alien papers, this has more info like how he got here, ships, dates etc, photo, fingerprints and more, might be worth finding, you can get them from the national archives

[RandyCOG3]

No, "we" have been here for a while.... the Mayflower must have been very crowded, as there was supposedly one of "us" aboard that vessel (not that I'll ever bothering to check) as well as a zillion other American families...i think we were here probably at least a couple of generations before him.
On my mother's side, the story was that her parents' grandparents were from Ireland; that end of things I'm confident of...
Thanks for the ideas though, might pay off for me if I ever decide to start researching stuff, definately will come in handy for some folks here.

RandyCOG3

[NavajoNPaleFace]

Ancestry.com is not accurate and/or complete.

I'm not there nor are my relatives that have served.

[kevin]

i know it not complete from my searches, but its nice to be able to find stuff by just typing and clicking the mouse, getting it the other way is a pain in the ass and takes a long time, believe me!