NPRC
The National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) is situated in St. Louis. The National
Personnel Records Center, Military Personnel Records (NPRC-MPR) is the repository
of millions of military personnel, health, and medical records of discharged and
deceased veterans of all services during the 20th century. NPRC (MPR) also stores
medical treatment records of retirees from all services, as well as records for dependent
and other persons treated at naval medical facilities. Information from the records
is made available upon written request (with signature and date) to the extent allowed
by law.
On July 12, 1973, a disastrous fire at NPRC (MPR) destroyed approximately 16-18 million
Official Military Personnel Files. The affected record collections are described
below:
- Army - Personnel discharged November 1, 1912, to January 1, 1960 - Estimated Loss
80%
- Air Force - Personnel discharged, September 25, 1947, to January 1, 1964(with names
alphabetically after Hubbard, James E.) - Estimated Loss 75%
- No duplicate copies of the records that were destroyed in the fire were maintained,
nor was a microfilm copy ever produced. There were no indexes created prior to the
fire. In addition, millions of documents had been lent to the Department of Veterans
Affairs before the fire occurred. Therefore, a complete listing of the records that
were lost is not available. Nevertheless, NPRC (MPR) uses many alternate sources
in its efforts to reconstruct basic service information to respond to requests.
- NARA has recently completed a major task of putting the World War 2 Enlistment Records
online.
