How do I change a person's race on their WWI draft registration card?
How do I change a person's race on their WWI draft registration card? For this man, their document profile lists their race as Indian, whereas on the actual document itself, the check in the Indian section is crossed out, indicating that they did not intend to put a check there and were seeking to undo their mistake. Their race is checked as Negro and they are also checked as a natural-born US citizen. I think that they initially put a check in the Indian section because that's where they thought that they need to show their US citizenship status and only later realized their mistake.
So, Yeah, how do I change this man's race from Indian to Negro on the profile for their WWI draft registration card?
Here's the person: Charlie Welford, born on February 14, 1882: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:KZ6C-X1H
FamilySearch allows you to edit the Name, Event Date, Event Place, Citizenship Place, Birth Date, and Birthplace, but bizarrely not the person's race even if FamilySearch lists the person's race incorrectly.
Answers
-
The index-correction feature on FamilySearch is incomplete: some fields of some indexes can be corrected. They are continuously working on expanding corrections, so eventually the "race" field in these draft registrations may become correctable.
In the meantime, you can console yourself with the fact that indexes are not data: they are merely finding aids for the data.
1
