How record matching
works.
Every soldier in our database has a unique serial number. Here's how The Accounted uses it to find their actual place in the archive, page by page, without guessing.
Every soldier has a serial number
Unlike names, which can be misspelled, shared by multiple men, or recorded inconsistently across different documents, every WWII soldier was assigned a unique service number the moment they enlisted. It's the single most reliable way to positively identify one soldier's records among millions of archive pages.
We search the actual scanned pages
The National Archives has digitized and OCR'd (scanned into searchable text) enormous volumes of Morning Reports, the daily unit records that tracked every soldier's status. Our system searches directly through that OCR'd text for a soldier's serial number, not through a secondhand summary or transcription. The page in the background above is a real one: a Company E, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment Morning Report from June 24, 1944, recording fourteen enlisted men and one officer missing in action following the Normandy jump. .
Handwritten records don't OCR perfectly, so we account for that
1940s military paperwork was often typed quickly or filled in by hand, and eighty-year-old scans don't always OCR cleanly. A serial number might be missing a hyphen, have a smudged digit, or use an officer's "O-" prefix instead of an enlisted soldier's plain number. Our matching system tries the realistic variations a real transcription error could produce, rather than requiring an exact character-for-character match.
You see the whole report, not just one page
A Morning Report entry rarely stands alone. It's part of a larger daily report covering the whole company. When we find a match, we help surface the full report around it, not just the isolated page where a serial number happened to appear.
Every match is a candidate, not a fact. Finding a serial number on a page is a strong signal, but it's still a candidate match until a person confirms it. Nothing gets added to a soldier's record automatically. You review each match yourself and decide whether it belongs, the same rigor as everything else on The Accounted.
No automatic match? Browse the unit's reports directly
Matching isn't perfect. A serial number might be there and simply go unrecognized, or the page itself might be too degraded to read at all. When that happens, you can search a soldier's unit's Morning Reports directly, unit by unit and month by month, and look for yourself. We're actively working toward making every unit searchable this way.