Primary Selections from Special Collections

With Memorial Day approaching, the staff at Richardson-Sloane Special Collections thought to share an online government resource to aid in searching for veterans who have served in United States military forces.

These resources are free and may be accessed from any computer. As always, our staff would be pleased to assist anyone visiting our department with research help on our public computers.

Following is a brief tutorial created by a RSSC staff member on one way to search part of the U.S. National Archives Records Administration Access to Archival Databases.

And yes, we found a lot of acronyms involved!

The Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) is part of  the U. S. National Archives & Records Administration (NARA) Access to Archival Databases (AAD).

This series was created for the Department of Defense (DoD) and contains records of U.S. military officers and soldiers who died as a result of either a hostile or non-hostile occurrence in the Korean War, Vietnam War, Gulf War, or War on Terrorism. It includes persons who were missing in action and prisoners of war, deaths occurring during peacetime (beginning in 1975), and deaths resulting from accident or illness. Dates of death range from June 28, 1950 to May 28, 2006.

There are several other databases available on this site and they are organized by category. We were looking for casualties.

Click the search button next to Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS). You can also search only Korean War or Vietnam Conflict casualties by selecting their “Extract Data File”

You can search by name, birth date, hometown, casualty location or death date. You may also add other fields to search. We searched for people from Davenport, Iowa and got 59 results.

The search results only show up to 10 fields (name, service, birth date, hometown, place of death, death date, war or conflict name, casualty/incident category). You can sort by any of these fields, for this example we sorted by birth date. Select the person you want and click on View Record to get more information.

Each record may include: the service member’s name, service name, rank or rate, occupation, date of birth,  hometown (city, county, state or province, country), casualty city, state or province and country, death date, war or conflict, operation incident, location, hostile or non-hostile death indicator, casualty type and category, incident casualty reason, body (recovered or not).

This is a wonderful site with many options. We hope it opens many research doors for those searching this Memorial Day.

(posted by Cristina)