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WWII Orders of Battle
Since my father’s personnel file burned at the NPRC leaving nothing behind, learning about a military organizations is important so that I can reconstruct his service using organizational records. The Ike Skelton Combined Arms Research Library (CARL) digital library is home to an important collection for beginning research into military organizations. This massive collection was donated by George Nafziger to the Library. The Nafziger Collection of Orders of Battle contains detailed information about military organizations spanning...
read moreReference from the Department of Veterans Affairs
The Department of Veterans Affairs offers a useful and interesting resource that can be downloaded. It is titled “America’s Wars.” As the title suggests, it contains a list of US Wars, as well as the years of the conflict. It goes beyond the dates to include the number of service members who were involved and the number of battle deaths. For most wars the number of non-mortal woundings is also reported along with other statistics. Notes that document estimated values are included. The second page of the reference includes...
read moreMore WWII Morning Reports using the NARA Catalog
While hunting for the rest of the Morning Reports for Battery A, 500th AAA Gun Battalion, I located a different format of the original roll, that offered a different option for downloading. (You can read how I searched for and download the Morning Reports of the 500th AAA Gun Battalion for September 1943’s at WWII Morning Reports using the NARA Catalog). The interesting thing about these Morning Reports is that June and July for the same organization were filmed sequentially. This makes me curious if the reason may be related to the...
read moreWWII Morning Reports using the NARA Catalog
WWII Morning Reports up to 1943 are now available on the NARA website and can be located through the NARA Catalog. (More Morning Reports are being added, as I have located ones for 1944, too.) For those wishing to research WWI Morning Reports, I recommend using them on Fold3. Why search for the Morning Reports? These organizational records can tell us where all the assigned soldiers were on a specific day, and the activities being done. They tell us when and how soldiers moved from place to place. They show when there were...
read moreNew Book: ChatGPT and Learning A Language
If you have read this blog or heard my talks, you probably know that I have incorporated ChatGPT into my workflow. The basic version of ChatGPT supports a lot of the mundane tasks I do, and in the “Crash Course on ChatGPT and…” book series, I am sharing lessons I learned and the prompts that were helpful. This time, the tasks go beyond genealogy and into learning a new language. ChatGPT has the potential to be immensely helpful when beginning to learn a new language. It can also explain the intricacies of a language...
read moreGenerate Images With A Free ChatGPT Account
Did you know that OpenAI allows users to generate images with a free account? At the time of writing this blog post, ChatGPT allows the use of DALL·E to generate two images per day with a free account. All you have to do is ask, by typing in the prompt. CAVEAT: Always research the ownership of any images generated in an AI tool before you consider publishing them. PROMPT: Create an image of an airplane flying over art deco buildings ChatGPT spent a little time and created an image. At the bottom of the image, ChatGPT...
read moreHow A WWII Morning Report Can Solve A Mystery
WWII Military Research can have challenges for many reasons. Of course, the fire at the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) may have burned an army ancestor’s file. Unlike WWI records. Not many of the WWII records are online. This means a little more work is required in identifying which records will help and then traveling to the repositories. We had known that my father was stationed in Greenland as a soldier during WWII, and that he traveled to Greenland by ship. He spoke very little about WWII, but that was some of the very...
read moreResearching Civilian Employees of the Federal Government
Researching Civilian Employees of the Federal Government This blog post is intended to get you started on researching civilians who worked for the Federal Government. Civilian employment also includes records for those who worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) or Works Project Administration (WPA) employment. NARA has an older publication that has information about their resources researching federal employees: https://www.archives.gov/files/publications/ref-info-papers/rip110.pdf (To find other NARA informational...
read moreFinding Helpful NARA Publications
Genealogists know to look for all available sources of information when doing their reasonably exhaustive search. We also know to list the resources when creating reports and proof documents. But how do we know what we don’t know? The best way is to keep learning. Keep reading, seek out publications about topics of interest, attend webinars and learn from other genealogists. A great place to look for source material is the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Without knowing what sources are available,...
read morePioneer Infantrymen at the National Museum of the US Army
Recently I attended The Army Historical Foundation’s Genealogy Seminar at the National Museum of the United States Army. The Museum is located at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. You can read about that seminar in Army Historical Foundation’s Genealogy Seminar. After the presentations, I had a little time to go through the Museum exhibits. As you might expect from my books and blogs posts, I headed to the first floor to look for the exhibits about WWI and WWII. With the Museum closing soon, I glanced around the Nation Overseas Gallery,...
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