When you are doing your genealogy research, you want to make sure that you get the most information that you possibly can out of each different resource that you search. Sometimes it is hard to know exactly what information you can get from any given resource. Also, you may not be aware that certain records even exist for your ancestors. For example, you would think to look for military records for your grandfather because you have heard stories of his heroic deeds during World War II. However, you may not have thought to check for draft registration cards for his two brothers, who were between the ages of 18 and 45 during the period that the draft was in effect.
Draft cards can be a great source of information about your ancestors. Even if they were never drafted, the information about their name, birth date, home town, and more has been preserved in these records. You can use the information on draft cards to fill in holes in your research as well as to verify other information that you have already found. The more times you can verify a fact relating to any ancestor, the more certain you can be about that part of your research.
You can even use information from a draft card to lead you to other records for an individual. For example, if you take the birth place and residence from your ancestor’s draft card you can use that information to figure out which of the five people with his name and place of residence at the time of the 1930 Census is most likely to be him. There is even a piece of information that was collected, the “Name of Someone Who Will Always Know Your Address”, which can lead you to information about other relatives like parents, spouses, or siblings. Again, this can lead either to new information or provide a means of verifying things that you have already found in other records.
Whenever you come across a record like a draft card which may contain more information than it seems to contain at first glance, try to obtain a copy of it for your records or save it of you have found it online. When you are having a hard time moving forward, go back through your collection of records and see whether there are any inferences that you can draw that you may not have noticed before.
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