WWII draft cards - dates
can someone tell me what is the significance of the "Feb 10, 1943" date stamped on the bottom of this record? This is my grandfather's record, he was in the Army Air Corps in Carlsbad, New Mexico 1941 - 1943, his discharge date was April 16, 1943. What does this stamp mean I wonder? @General Questions
Answers
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it is the date when the paper work started
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What paperwork? The paperwork for the discharge? Would that have been done in Colorado? If so, why Colorado when he was in New Mexico? He enlisted in California... And his address while in the service was listed as Oklahoma (he was born and raised in Oklahoma)
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I'd take a guess that it had to be Otero County, Colorado, because that's what the rules appear to state - it's the stamp for the local board for the county where registration took place, which was surely where he was living when he registered??? (Rocky Ford, as I'm sure you know, but I didn't, is in Otero Co.)
But why 1943? Good question. Maybe they held his registration so they needed to be kept up to date with his discharge....? Just a guess.
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Thank you. Yes it was Rocky Ford, Otero, Colorado. It appears that he lived there briefly during a few months in 1940... there are no other records of him living in Colorado before or after oct 1940 that I can find.
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Also and 🤷🏻♀️i dont know🤷🏻♀️ if this is relevant but for some reason he shows up in Arkansas in March 1943 getting married. There are no other ties to Arkansas that I’ve been able to find either
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There are usually 2 sides to the draft cards--we didn't get to see the other side. I am assuming that the date of signatures on the other side reinforce the registration date of October 1940. That being the case, the 1943 date stamp was likely just the date when the draft card finally got around to being stamped by the local board.
My guess is that the draft board in that location was pretty busy filling out those generic draft cards by hand during that 2 years at the head of the war and just didn't get around to going through and stamping all of the cards. If you go to the full set of draft cards in the record, what do the dates look like on cards that are adjacent to this one in the record?
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ty @JeffWiseman JeffWiseman ! I didn't think to check the others! thank you!
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I am adding the first page of the draft card here
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also... would the "serial number" located in top left corner and "order number" in top right corner be of any use to me for research purposes? I think I read somewhere once that the color of the ink (this one being red for the "order number" meant something... anyone know anything about that?
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I have probably indexed at least a thousand of these cards. Usually there was no date in with the stamp and if there was it matched the registration date. Can you look at the cards around this one and see how they were marked?
This link explains the serial numbers and order numbers. https://lisalouisecooke.com/2019/02/13/wwii-draft-registrations/
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Yea, so from that page you can see that he would have turned 28 years on 5 June 1940 -- only four months before the draft registration date in October 1940. So the registration date would be correct. And as Melissa mentions below, it is unusual to even have a date associated with the draft board's stamp. So it is probably something unique to that specific county board.
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