- Just stumbled on to the Trench and Camp Newsletter at the Library of Congress.
If you do any research on the U.S. Military and World War I, you will find a dearth of records. The 1973 fire at the U.S. Archives in Saint Louis burned millions of service records, so the trail went cold pretty fast. When I requested his service records, I got exactly pages relating to his receiving around six bucks worth of back pay.
There are some unit summaries or catalogs online. He served with the 361st Infantry Regiment, and I found a google book related to their WWI service. It mostly amounts to a list of names in the unit, and those killed or wounded. He was wounded in action.
I’ve been poking around in Ancestry.com, the National Archives, Newspapers.com, etc., trying to locate my great uncle’s service record. Chronicling America, the Library of Congress’s database of historic newspapers yielded a few hometown articles related to his service as well.
I’m not aware of U.S. Army records existing beyond these, but I continue to seek them. I can begin looking for the movements of the 361st Infantry in Western Europe after 1917 as a starting point.
Researching U.S. Involvement in WWI
If you do any research on U.S. Veterans of WWI, you will soon discover that most soldier records were burned in the U.S. Archives fire in Saint Louis Missouri in 1973. This feels like a dead end, but there are some other places to look. Ancestry.com has birth, death and marriage. Newspaper archives can yield some good information also. I’m using the Library of Congresses, Chronicling America, for the State of Montana, as that’s where my research is centered. Here is a list of Montana Newspapers. My research focuses from 1917-1919, and many papers do not cover that period, but some do, and I have found articles relevant to my research in the Great Falls Tribune Newspaper.
All Things Adam 