I'd been having some trouble locating my great-grandfather, Joseph Mulcahy, and his brothers in Ancestry.com's WWI Draft Registration Card database, so I figured I should try browsing the records. They're alphabetical, so it should be easy, right? Not so fast. To browse the collection, you have to first choose a Draft Board. These draft boards have incredibly helpful (not!) names like "23," "24," and "25." Names that tell me
nothing about them and offer no clues as to which I should be browsing. Luckily, the Italian Genealogical Group at
italiangen.org has an archives newsletter that lists
the addresses of all the the WWI Draft Boards in New York City. I used the information there to map the locations of the Brooklyn Draft Boards so that I could better approximate which one Papa and the Mulcahy brothers would have registered with. Unfortunately, I was still unable to find them. I know they served. Perhaps they enlisted before they had to register with the draft board? I imagine - though I'm not sure - that do so would have prevented their appearing in these records.
Though it didn't help me find records of the Mulcahy brothers, I'm hopeful that it will be useful for other researchers trying to find military records of Brooklyn families. Please distribute the map - found on Google maps
here - to other researchers who might be helped by it!
View WWI Draft Board Locations, Brooklyn in a larger map
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