How historians actually
research a soldier.

Gather everything you already know

Before searching the archives, gather all available information about the individual: full name, date and place of birth, service number, branch of service, rank, known unit(s), enlistment date if known, date of death if applicable, and any photographs, letters, discharge papers, newspaper articles, medals, or other family documents.

The service number is particularly important. Unlike a name, which can be shared by multiple people and can appear in different forms across records, a military service number is unique to the individual. It becomes the key that allows you to follow that person through many different military records — an Official Military Personnel File (OMPF), morning reports, general orders, unit records, and other personnel-related records.

The OMPF should generally be one of the first records requested, even though there is a significant limitation: approximately 80% of U.S. Army personnel files were destroyed in the 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri.

However, the loss of the original file does not necessarily mean no personnel information is available. The National Archives has been able to reconstruct portions of some records using documents that survived elsewhere. A reconstructed file might contain only a few pages — a final pay document identifying a soldier's unit, or a discharge document establishing where he served — but even a single document can provide an important clue.

The OMPF is therefore valuable not only for what it contains, but also for the clues it provides for the next stage of research.

Find the soldier in the Morning Reports

Once you have the service number — and ideally some indication of the soldier's unit — the next step is to locate him in the Morning Reports, among the most valuable records available for reconstructing an individual soldier's military career.

Morning Reports were generally maintained at the company level and below, recording changes in a soldier's status within the unit: joining or leaving, transfers, promotions, wounds, death, missing in action, sickness or hospitalization, furlough, temporary duty, returning to duty, and other changes.

Their real strength is continuity. They were maintained daily — once you identify a soldier in one report, you can work backward and forward through the reports, following his movements and changes in status over time.

Using the Record Matcher

This is where The Accounted Record Matcher becomes particularly useful. Inside the Accounted dashboard, researchers can search for a soldier using their service number, identifying records associated with that individual and making it far easier to locate him within the available Morning Reports and other indexed records. Because the service number is unique, it provides a much more reliable way of connecting records than searching by name alone.

For example, suppose you discover that a soldier was assigned to the 16th Infantry Regiment in January 1944, and a December 1944 Morning Report records that he was wounded. You can work backward to determine when he actually joined the company, and forward through the reports to establish what happened to him during his time with the unit — transforming a collection of isolated documents into a chronological timeline of the soldier's service.

Build the wider story

Once you have established the individual's timeline, you can begin placing that soldier inside the history of his unit. The Morning Reports tell you what happened to the individual. Other military records help explain what was happening around him: After-Action Reports, unit journals, S-2 intelligence reports, S-3 operations reports, general orders, situation reports, maps and overlays, division and regimental histories, and other contemporary military records.

There is an important challenge, however: many of these records have not been digitized. Unlike Morning Reports and some personnel records, researchers often cannot simply search the internet for an After-Action Report, unit journal, S-2 report, S-3 report, general order, or operational overlay.

Using the unit records index in The Accounted

This is where the Accounted dashboard can help. It provides an index of available records for almost every U.S. Army unit, letting you determine what types of records exist for a particular unit and where they can be found. The index does not mean every document is available digitally — instead, it provides a roadmap: what exists, which unit produced it, what period it covers, and where to look for it.

If the Morning Reports establish that a soldier was serving with a particular company on a particular date, you can use the unit-record index to identify the surviving records for that company, battalion, regiment, or division, and use them to determine what that unit was doing at the time. The result is no longer simply a list of dates and personnel changes — you can begin to reconstruct the soldier's story within the larger story of the war.

Personnel records tell us who the soldier was. Morning Reports tell us where he was and what happened to him. Unit records tell us what was happening around him.

Look for the faces behind the record

By this point, the personnel records have told you who your soldier was. The Morning Reports have told you what happened to him. The unit records have told you what was happening around him. But so far, all of it is still words on a page.

There is often still a question that words alone cannot answer: what did he actually look like? What did the men beside him look like? What did their unit, their equipment, their daily life in the field actually look like? This is where photographs come in — through two main paths: divisional albums and Signal Corps caption cards.

Divisional Albums

Many divisions and regiments published their own photographic histories after the war, often compiled by the unit itself or by veterans' associations. These albums are typically organized by unit and by campaign, which makes them far easier to search than a general photo archive — by the time you reach this step, you already know the unit, and often the approximate period, from your work in Steps 1 through 3.

Divisional albums can include group photographs, individual portraits, award ceremonies, and candid images of daily life that never made it into an official archive at all. They are not always easy to find, and coverage varies enormously from one division to the next, but when one exists for your soldier's unit, it is often the single richest visual source available.

NARA caption cards

The second path runs through the U.S. Army Signal Corps, whose photographers documented operations, units, and personnel throughout the war. Their photographs are held at the National Archives, and each one is generally accompanied by a caption card — a short official record noting the date, location, unit, and a brief description of what the photograph shows. Award ceremonies and other notable moments sometimes name the individuals pictured directly.

NARA also maintains a Personalities Index, which lists most — though not all — of the names mentioned across the captions. If your soldier happened to be named in a caption, this is the most direct way to find him. But most soldiers were never individually named, so the more reliable path is still the caption cards themselves, searched by unit, date, and location — the exact combination of details your research has already established by this point.

As with the unit records described in Step 3, there is an important limitation here: many of these photographs have not been digitized. Unlike the Morning Reports, which are broadly available online, viewing a specific Signal Corps photograph often means requesting it directly, which in practice means hiring an independent researcher to visit the NARA facility in person on your behalf.

Searching Signal Corps photographs in The Accounted

Manually working through Signal Corps caption cards one at a time is slow, and the cards themselves are not always easy to search. We are working on making this easier by building out better searchable caption cards for The Accounted — adding unit data, locations, and other metadata to the existing finding aids, so instead of paging through thousands of individual cards, you can search directly for what was photographed near your soldier's unit, in the period you already care about.

This does not mean every photograph is digitized and ready to view — many still require an in-person request. What it gives you is a realistic way to identify which caption cards are actually worth requesting. And even when the photograph isn't of your soldier by name, a photograph of his company, in the same terrain, in the same conditions, in the same week he was there, still puts a face and a place to the record in a way no document alone can.

Personnel records tell us who he was. Morning Reports tell us what happened to him. Unit records tell us what was happening around him. A photograph, when you find one, tells us what it actually looked like to be there.

Make the story visual

After working through the personnel records, Morning Reports, After-Action Reports, unit histories, photographs, and other available records, you may have a fairly detailed timeline of what happened to the individual. But there is often still a fundamental question: what did it actually look like?

For example, suppose your father served during the Battle of the Bulge and was wounded during the fighting. Through the Morning Reports, you may be able to establish the date. The After-Action Reports may tell you what his company or battalion was doing that day. A unit history may provide additional context. But you may still not know exactly where the action took place, how the unit moved, or what the battlefield looked like. This is where maps become essential.

Map Overlays

One of the most powerful tools used by military planners and commanders during the Second World War was the map overlay — a sheet of transparent paper, often called onion paper, that could be placed directly over a military map. Instead of drawing on the original map, officers could draw positions, movements, objectives, boundaries, and enemy positions on the overlay, which could then be sent to higher headquarters and placed over an identical copy of the same map.

The key to making this work was the map grid. By referencing the grid coordinates and map sheet used, a headquarters could place the overlay in exactly the correct position on its own map, communicating information without sending the actual map itself.

Operations overlays could show the positions and movements of units during a particular period or operation — an S-2 report might describe what was happening, while the overlay showed where. Overlays were also used during planning, with field orders showing objectives, routes, boundaries, phase lines, and planned movements — creating an important opportunity for the researcher to compare the planned operation with what actually happened: an attack plan showing where a company was supposed to advance, an operations overlay showing where it actually moved, an After-Action Report explaining what happened, and the Morning Reports recording which soldiers were affected. Combined, these sources let you reconstruct the battle at the level of the individual soldier.

Digitizing the battlefield with The Accounted

This is where the Overlay Builder in The Accounted becomes particularly powerful. When an original overlay is available, the researcher can identify the base map it references and load that map into the Overlay Builder. The alignment tools allow the overlay to be positioned precisely over the original map using its grid and geographical reference points, and the researcher can then digitally redraw the information contained on the original — creating a georeferenced digital version of the historical document, viewable together with the original historical map.

From the 1940s battlefield to today

The Accounted also allows the historical map to be compared with modern satellite imagery. Once the historical map and overlay have been correctly aligned, the researcher can switch between the original wartime map and the modern satellite layer. Suddenly, historical grid references become physical locations — a position marked on an operations overlay can be compared with the modern landscape, a route of advance traced across today's roads and fields, a battalion objective located on the modern terrain. If your research has established that your father was wounded while his company was moving through that area, you can begin to understand where he was and what was happening around him at the moment he was wounded.

The goal is not simply to put an old map on top of a modern map. The goal is to reconstruct the battlefield — moving from "my father was wounded during the Battle of the Bulge" to "this is the unit he was with, this is where the unit was positioned, this is the operation they were conducting, this is how the unit moved, and this is the area in which he was wounded."

Go there yourself

At some point, the research reaches its natural limit. You know who he was, what happened to him, what was happening around him, what he and his unit looked like, and — thanks to the work in Step 5 — where it all happened, down to the position on the map.

The last step is to go and stand there.

Some researchers hire a local battlefield guide, particularly in areas like Normandy or the Ardennes where experienced guides know the terrain and can walk you directly to a unit's positions. Others prefer to go on their own, using the same georeferenced maps and coordinates built in Step 5 as a field guide — the overlay that once lived only on a wartime map can now guide you across the actual ground.

Either way works. What matters is that the research doesn't end on a page. It ends somewhere real, with the same terrain your soldier once stood on now standing in front of you.