This Veterans Day, America's Military Families Have New Ways to Learn More About Their Ancestors' Service

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Free of charge, people can request military files through the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. But what they get back can sometimes be hard to decipher, or incomplete.

Social media has helped families make the research easier. People can sign up for webinars to learn how to begin a search at the National Archives or to research veterans of a specific conflict, like Korea. Sites for crowd-sourcing headstone information like FindAGrave.com and BillionGraves help people figure out where veterans are buried. The website Fold3 is searchable by war. And if families know the unit in which their ancestor served, some military units keep detailed histories.

Popular genealogy websites like Ancestry.com and MyHeritage have vast newspaper collections that date back to the Revolutionary War era, so users can search for obituaries and announcements about births, engagements, marriages and awards. On Ancestry.com, military records are also free to search until Nov. 17.

But because the research can be time consuming, some people hire research assistants and genealogists. And since May of 2018, there’s been another resource available particularly for those seeking World War II records, as the National WWII Museum in New Orleans has been helping families fill in those gaps.