Military service files
Your ancestor's service, pension and burial — found in the National Archives and cited
Service records, pension files and veteran burials are among the best-documented records in America, and among the hardest to navigate. We search the National Archives Catalog and the veterans' burial registers for one person and return what exists, with the record identifiers you need to order the file.
What you would tell us
- The veteran's name, rough birth year and the war or era
- Any state or unit you know
What you would receive
- Every matching record found, with its archive identifier and link
- What to order, from whom, and what it costs the archive charges
- A plain statement of what was not found
Which public archives this draws on today
- Chronicling America (Library of Congress) — Historic US newspapers 1690s–1963 with OCR text: obituaries, notices, local news
- National Archives Catalog (NARA) — Passenger lists, naturalizations, military service and pension files, homestead/land files, census images, federal records
- Open Archives (207 archives: Netherlands, Belgium, France, Suriname + US indexes) — Civil registration (birth, marriage, death), church books, population registers, notarial and tax rolls, militia — 207 archives
- VA Nationwide Gravesite Locator — 8.4M veteran and dependent burials: names, birth/death dates, cemetery, branch, rank, wars
- DigitalNZ / Papers Past (New Zealand) — Papers Past newspapers 1839–1980s (full text), plus NZ library, museum and archive collections
- Queensland State Archives indexes (Australia) — Immigration and passenger indexes, naturalisations, wills, inquests, hospital deaths, gaol registers, orphanages, Boer War — 12 of 128 CC BY indexes searched live
6 live archives hold the record types this service rests on. Archives whose terms forbid automated access are never searched by machine; where one of them holds the answer, the report says exactly where to look.
Interested?
Or search the archives yourself, free, right now.
Provara's rule for every service: a fact is shown with the record it came from, or it is marked as unsourced. Nothing on this page states a fact about any person or place; it describes what would be researched and from which public archives.