About Home of Record

Definition of Home of Record:
When a person enters the military, he or she completes many paper or electronic forms. One of the fields on a form is Home of Record, which becomes the location the Department of Defense (DoD) is obligated to provide travel expenses to when that person leaves the military.
 
Many persons enter their current residence or the city where the military induction is taking place, even though their actual residence may be a suburb or even many miles away. For example, if a person is living away from home at college, he or she may enter that city and state.
 
While on active duty, military persons may request a change of their home of record. This is commonly done if a person buys or rents a house or otherwise establishes a residence away from his or her original home of record.
 
Therefore, Home of Record may or may not be where the person was born, where she or he grew up, or where she or he attended high school.

We use Home of Record on The Virtual Wall
The Virtual Wall uses many sources of information: including three different casualty databases and casualty records and personnel records that originated within the Department of Defense, unit histories, unit morning reports, and documents from the presidential libraries and National Archives and Records Administration. The one common field in the casualty databases is "Home of Record". Very few of the other documents ever existed in electronic form, only on paper.

Changes we CAN make on The Virtual Wall
We report the official Home of Record. We do not have the authority to change history or to change the official records of any person. We CAN, however, change spelling errors in the name of a town or city as shown on a personal memorial page and on a state index page. Many state name abbreviations were transcribed wrong into the original DoD database. We can correct those in our own database.

Next of kin can request an Official Home of Record change from the Department of Defense (not us) by downloading form DD149, completing it, and mailing to the address on the form. Please understand that your request may be denied. They may tell you something like: "All the records indicate he joined the Army in (name of city), where he was attending college." After you receive a letter stating your request for an official change has been made, please send us a copy of that letter so we can change our own database.

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