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My answer consists of three parts. I start with World War II because more (individual) records are available and I assume people are more interested in it. The second part focusses on World War I and possible research difficulties. The last part covers projects and institutions providing e.g. information on burial sites and memorials of both wars.
World War ...
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When a straightforward search for a record comes up empty, I think it's important to step back and look at the larger picture, so that one can understand the context of the record -- that often leads to clues about where one might find it.
The question as posed actually has two separate questions in it. One is to find out more about the incident in which ...
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Update: new information on birth place
Let’s sum up what we know for sure:
You had a great-grandfather with the surname Rebholz
What we assume:
He was born in Sigmaringen
What is unknown:
his first name(s)
his birth date
his place and date of death
You are lucky, the birth and other records from the Standesamt Sigmaringen are available online from ...
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Take a look at the image and scroll back a few pages, to the start of that enumeration book. You will see it shows the location of the regiment at the time of enumeration:
Pietermaritzburg, Natal, South Africa
If, for some reason, you did not have access to the images, you can go to The National Archives catalogue and search for the reference given in your ...
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Ancestry has "UK, Navy Lists, 1888-1970" - these include "multiple volumes of the Navy List, the Royal Navy’s official published list of officers." There are 4 records for your father (1941, 42, 44 and 1945 - I'd guess he's in the 1943 as well but it's not indexed?)
p.1639 of Volume II of the July 1945 list (I don't know how often the paper versions were ...
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Your mention of missing persons in the 1850's means I could guess that you suspect he was born in the 1840's or slightly earlier, but it is unclear.
As you don't mention the name we're unable to help with suggesting alternatives. For example, the Monair family I'm researching is often transcribed as McNair, and McNae is sometimes McRae. It's not just ...
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The Israel Genealogy Research Association (https://genealogy.org.il) is in the process of indexing marriage and divorce records from the British Mandate period. You can search their database and see all the information for free, but it requires one to register on their site first. Viewing the actual marriage certificate requires membership in the ...
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The German Red Cross also maintains a WWII tracing service that works independantly from the ICRC services. They have their own records (I confirmed this via email), which indicates that they may even in some cases have information that the ICRC doesn't.
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The Deutsche Dienststelle (WASt) holds
Approximately 1.500.000 files (residue) on foreign P.o.Ws. in German custody. (Assets of the Deutsche Dienststelle)
I wrote a little bit on using records from the Deutsche Dienststelle in my answer to How to find information on German soldiers from World War I and World War II?. In a nutshell: You’ll send a ...
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The easiest way is to make a record request so that St. Louis can pull the record and scan it for you.
YouTube recording of Day 3 of the 2014 Virtual Genealogy Fair. See session 13, "Discovering Your Family’s Past in Military and Early Veterans Administration Personal Data Records and Selective Service Records" by Stephen A. Smith, Daria Labinsky, & ...
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This means that he was retained (“zurückgeh.” = “zurückgehalten”) by a neutral country until now (“bish.” = “bisher”), as this list of abbreviations for the navy lists suggests. Now he is prisoner of war (“krgef.” = “kriegsgefangen”). “A” could indicate that this information was received from a foreign country (“Ausland“), as “A.N.” is elsewhere used for “...
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The uniform is from the time around World War I (see, for instance, World War 1 Uniforms and US Enlisted Uniforms 1900 - 1918: Part 2: Uniform Patterns (Enlisted) Army).
The uniform style doesn't indicate the branch of the U.S. Army.
The button is called a "collar disc", and the "48" is a unit number, either a regiment or battalion depending on how the ...
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You should be very, very, careful with this. My alarm bells are set off, because despite the emphatic denial of your father's second cousin, he is still a strong candidate. He could know and not want to tell anyone. Or he might be the father and not know and never was told by the mother, or maybe the mother didn't even know that he specifically was the ...
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According to the article Mississippi and the U.S.-Mexican War, 1846-1848 by Sam Olden, posted on the website Mississippi History Now (an online publication of the Mississippi Historical Society), Company C was the Vicksburg Southrons.
See also this page at Tufts, which is a digital version of: Colonel Charles E. Hooker, Confederate Military History, a ...
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I can confirm that the text on both cards is indeed in German. Your first card is dated to 1920, the second one seems to have been stamped by the post office in 1917. As far as I know Sütterlin was only developed in 1911 and taught in schools from 1915 on, so the people writing these cards would have learned another form of Kurrent rather than specifically ...
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This article describes the incident:
http://aircrewremembered.com/roy-arnold.html
and leads me to search for "Oblt Walter Schneider" which comes up with another website or two.
https://airpages.ru/eng/lw/fw190a1_1.shtml
(Fw 190A-1, Werk Nr 027, "Yellow 1" of JG 26, of Oblt Walter Schneider in November 1941, which showed nineteen victory ...
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There are some sources but they are fragmented and most of them are not digitized yet.
One online source about WWI casualties for 1914-1915 years is in the Russian State Library. It's far from being complete, but it's the largest online source I know of.
I don't think there are any indexed/searchable sources at all.
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For another timeline see the table American Involvement in Wars from Colonial Times to the Present on the American History section of About.com.
I went to Fold3 to puzzle out what the source of this image might be -- as ColeValleyGirl says, it's important to have the context in order to analyze this record.
I don't have a current Fold3 membership, so I can'...
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The International Red Cross holds a lot of information about POW's from WW2. They are currently digitising all their records. At the moment you have to make a written application for them to conduct a search and as a result the response from them can take some time. I did some research on my Father-in-law with them. It took about 3 months from when I applied ...
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I have been trying to check up on one of my Army pensioners (Private Samuel Bateman, 834, 49th Regiment of Foot) - he is recorded as 2y 10m on "China / Eastern Expedition" (the embarrassing-to-us-now First Opium War).
The 49th were in India before sailing for China - there are separate accounts of the 49th's history in that campaign These have "India, ...
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Update: Since the original question and the early answers were written, John has found out that his great-grandfather was not born in Kreuzlingen, but Sigmaringen, now in Baden-Wurttemberg in Germany. I'll leave my answer as a case study for how to find the birthplace when it is not known, since it also addresses the family story about the Swiss citizenship ...
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These notations should appear on Russian Empire Revision Lists (which were kind of like census lists). That is, if a son was present in the 9th Revision List but not the 10th, the 10th would say that Yankel, born 18XX and age XX in the 9th list, had been serving in the army since 18XX, and therefore was not present for the 10th list that year.
...
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Well, building off of Robert Shaw's answer, it appears to me that the person in the photograph is wearing a Type I unit disk, which puts the photo somewhere between 1910 and 1937.
According to both the link in Robert's answer and this document - https://history.army.mil/html/museums/uniforms/survey_uwa.pdf -
the regimental number (48 in this case) was ...
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The 113th infantry regiment was from Baden (Freiburg im Breisgau).
The garrison for the 113th infantry regiment can be looked up online, e.g. in GenWiki or in the literature ( Das 5. Badische Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 113 im Weltkriege 1914/18 Oldenburg/Berlin 1925; Udo von Rundstedt: Das 5. Badische Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 113 im Weltkriege 1914/18 ...
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If I am not mistaken this speciality code used for Airman who were linguistic experts working for the A F Electronics Security Command. The majority of whom I met, worked within top secret facilities. These individual usually attended Defense Language Institute. The AFSC of the individual indicated he was in training. Upon completion he would become a 5 ...
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The "Berlin Airlift Historical Foundation" have a website with a fair amount of information. That includes "The Men Who Participated". That has a list of units that were involved, only some of which have crew lists linked. Fortunately, one of them is for the 12th Troop Carrier Squadron, which includes Robert S. Whitehead among its members.
The 12th Troop ...
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For searching in the Verlustlisten you shouldn't use Ancestry’s incomplete version, but the complete and manually indexed version by Compgen - Verein für Computergenealogie: Verlustlisten Erster Weltkrieg (German), search form (Nachname = family name, vorname = given name, Ort = (birth) place; you should fill only the first ones if possible as the original ...
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The Delaware Military History organization may have some useful material, including pictures and camp activity reports and newsletters.
The National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) has basic records of German POW's held in the US. When the soldier was repatriated, their personnel record was given to the country for which they fought. Within that ...
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We probably can't prove that "Soldier Matthew" is the same as "Family Matthew", but we can seek to demonstrate that they are not the same person. If, for example, the military records show that Soldier Matthew was serving overseas at the time that Family Matthew got married, we would conclude that they were different men.
The discharge record has a hand-...
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Service records for those who served during the 20th century are held by the National Personnel Records Center, Military Personnel Records (NPRC-MPR) (part of the US National Archives in St Louis).
Records are turned over to the National Archives after a certain period of time -- this is sometimes called a a rolling window. For military records, they ...
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