President's Pen - April 2025
Walter Charles Weis Jr.
I have used Fold3 in the past to locate Civil War records for my six ancestors who joined Union military branches in support of a united country. However, after hearing Marian Burk Wood explain how to fully utilize this amazing website, both for military and non-military records, I realize that I have only scratched the surface.
Marian walked us through how to navigate the home page of Fold3 by using the search and filter box to narrow the focus of our searches. By using keywords such as name, date, place, conflict, military branch, and country to narrow down our search, our success rate increases. Marian also pointed out that the Fold3 home page is not intuitive and searching a database that contains over six million documents that cover records from the Revolutionary War to Afghanistan and Iraq and vast amounts of non-military records would be time consuming without employing these filters.
I wanted to put Marian’s presentation to the test by looking for the military records of my father, Walter Charles Weis Jr., who joined the Navy toward the end of WWII. First, let me explain why this subject was of particular interest to me. Dad used to tell us that he wanted to “go to war,” but was sent to Occidental College for reserve officer training, then sent to radio school in Illinois, then to Mississippi, and finally to Texas to teach Navy pilots how to take off and land on aircraft carriers. He always joked that he was in the Navy but never saw a ship.
Using the methods I learned from Marian, I was able to find seven records that confirmed Dad’s stories. In March 1944, at the age of 17, my dad was enrolled at Occidental College in Los Angeles in the V12 program designed to rapidly train and commission officers in the Navy. When that program ended, he was transferred in February 1945 to the Naval Training Center at Great Lakes, Illinois, for V6 reserve officer training. Reclassified as a Seaman 1st Class, he was sent to Pre-Radio Material School at Wright Junior College in Chicago, Illinois, in March 1945. Dad was then transferred to Gulfport, Mississippi, for Elementary Electrical and Radio Material School in April 1945. From Gulfport he was sent to Corpus Christi, Texas, in October 1945 to begin his training at the Auxiliary Air Station at Cuddihy Field. It was here that he taught link training to future pilots. Dad’s stories were true!
With the aid of Marian’s presentation, I was able to fill in the blanks about my father’s Navy service, find his service number for future searches, and use Google to find out the definitions of military shorthand. Now, I want to build a memorial on Fold3 for my dad.
What have you discovered on Fold3?