This came on another mail list.
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DOD will preserve veterans' personnel filesDOD will preserve
veterans'
personnel files
By Lisa Burgess, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Wednesday, July 14, 2004
ARLINGTON, Va. - U.S. government officials have decided to preserve
the
personnel files of every military member since 1885, and to allow
public
access to such records 62 years after official discharge or
separation.
An agreement designating these files as "permanent records" was
signed
Thursday by Archivist of the United States John Carlin and David
Chu,
undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness.
The National Archives and Records Administration will maintain the
records
"forever," according to Greg Pomicter, assistant for operations in
the
NARA's Office of Regional Records Services.
Protecting personnel files is crucial because they contain the legal
documents veterans and their families need in order to claim
entitlements
that may have accrued from military service, Pomicter said in a
Monday
telephone interview from NARA's Suitland, Md., headquarters.
Before the agreement was signed, the U.S. government would release
only
basic information, such as the dates of service. Only the member
himself, if
alive, or next-of-kin, if the member was dead, had access to the
entire
file, Pomicter said.
Under the new policy, the public will have access to records 62
years
after a servicemember's official discharge or separation - "a wealth
of
information" that will appeal to a variety of individuals, Pomicter
said.
After a six-month survey of records requests, archivists found that
the
nature of requests moved from administrative to historical between
56 years
and 62 years after the servicemember's separation, and went with the
higher
number to be safe.
People searching for genealogical data will find that the records
"give
you a tremendous amount of family history," Pomicter said.
Personnel files contain medical information, performance reports and
disciplinary actions, as well as birth, marriage and death records,
and
adoption records and visas for family history purposes.
Academics and other researchers, meanwhile, will be able to use the
records to reconstruct all sorts of information, such as the
demographic
composition of a specific military unit and how it has changed over
time,
Pomicter said.
But if a servicemember is still alive after 62 years, the Privacy
Act of
1974 allows NAR officials to "redact," or black out, certain
information,
such as Social Security numbers, Pomicter said.
"If we have any indication that person is alive, we'll be very
careful
what's released ... to ensure that there's no unwarranted invasion
of a
person's privacy," Pomicter said.
It will take at least a decade for government archivists to transfer
all
56 million eligible records to the public domain, however.
That's because before 1960, DOD did not necessarily file its
personnel
records by date of discharge, requiring archivists to sort through
the
jackets one-by-one to discern whether they meet the 62-year age
requirement,
Pomicter said.
The first major block of files - nearly 1 million personnel records
for
sailors and Marines that date back to World War I - will be released
this
fall, Pomicter said.
To learn how to search records maintained by the National Archives
and
Records Administration including records that have been archived
electronically, go to:
www.archives.gov.