The Draft and the Selective Service System

Corporal Joseph King born on July 4 1776 served during the War of 1812. This cases study follows King before, during, and long after the war ends to his death in 1877.

Organized in Chicago, IL in 1917 by citizens who believed the United States Department of Justice was understaffed and not up to the task of fighting against espionage. They grew to a volunteer force of more than 250,000 members. The APL was given absolute power to stop ordinary citizens in the streets by checking whether men were legally registered for draft, or were sympathetic to the Germans, or those unregistered aliens living in the United States. Long believed to be a pseudo-patriotic organization. The APL documented both members and their activities in rich genealogical and historical details at the time the United States entered World War I.

Tens of thousands of young men came together to serve in the vanguard of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program. Discover some of your ancestors who may have worked and served in the Civilian Conservation Corps from 1933 to 1942. The New Deal era in American History has many great resources that have been untapped for years, and seldom used by genealogists and family historians.

The Merchant Marines have always played a pivotal and important role in American history. Without their efforts and sacrifice the wars of the twentieth century could have turned out very differently. A series of acts passed by Congress in 1916, 1920, and 1936 would officially organize the Merchant Marines into…

This lecture focuses on records of the Canadian Expeditionary Forces; including the C.E.F. personal files, Commonwealth grave registry, Regimental Nominal Rolls, and American’s fighting for Canada during this conflict and other records of the Royal Navy and Marines.

This lecture focuses on genealogical and historical materials to finding ancestors who fought during this conflict.

Sometimes referred to as the twentieth centuries “Forgotten War” The Korea War has been overshadowed by the larger conflicts both before and afterwards-namely World War II and Vietnam.

The end of the nineteenth century witnessed the transformation of the United States from a developing nation into a global power. Discover your ancestors that served in the war with Spain along with records of the Boxer Rebellion (1900) and the Philippine Insurrection (1899-1902) in which United States troops participation...

This second session will be broken into two groups of records that relate to your ancestors who fought in the Civil War.