The JGIRC has obtained three files that are the indexes to the US Alien Registration Files. These files came to us with no explanation of what was contained in them, so we must figure it out for ourselves.

We are not the only site to have some of these files. Ancestry calls their collection “Index to Alien Case Files at the National Archives at Kansas City, 1944-2003”; they have one of the files. FamilySearch calls it “Index to Alien Case Files, 1940-2003”; they have two of the files.

Ancestry further says that their file was for immigrants born before 1909 who registered between 1944 and 2003 and that these are the files in Kansas City. The files at Reno, San Francisco, Honolulu, and Guam are at NARA San Bruno and not contained in their index. Ancestry continues with information about NARA in Kansas City to order copies of the records as follows:

Afiles.KansasCity@nara.gov
National Archives at Kansas City
Attn: A-Files Request
400 W. Pershing Rd.
Kansas City, MO 64108
Fax: (816) 268–8038

FamilySearch provides a page on their wiki about their collection, which has similar information, although theirs says that the registration in San Bruno may not be included in the index: https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/

We believe that the third file that these other sites do not have is a continuation of the first two.

The NARA web site states that there are more than 600,000 files in Kansas City, so we may have their entire index with our 679,578 records. There is more information on their web site as well.

(Except that our programming states there are 691,200. It seems that every program counts differently. You’d think a computer could count consistently…)

Running some quick searches, we found birth years from 1812 to 1910, entry to the US years from 1855 to 2037. (Cool, people from the future!) There are only ten entries for those who immigrated after 2006, with two in the future. Naturalization dates range from 1900 to 2011. (With one in 9999.)

Why are there naturalization dates before 1940 if alien registration began that year? Good question. We don’t know. But there are hundreds of them in the database.

There are a couple of fields we could not identify, like DFO, which ranges from 1883 to 2015. We could guess what the fields mean, but we’ll leave that to you since we can’t verify it.

You can search this collection on the main GeneaSearch site or on a special site just for this collection: US Alien Registration Files Index.

Some fields have codes in them. We did not fill in the abbreviations. However, there were separate spreadsheets for three of the abbreviated fields. They are presented here. Use the search box to find the codes you need.

Some time ago, the JGIRC search engine moved to a new site: GeneaSearch. This new search engine provided a needed upgrade to the original, simpler search engine we had running on this site.

The same features are still there, but better, Where our search engine would only search on the names of the main person in the record, GeneaSearch will search all of the surname fields and all of the given name fields.

Additionally, GeneaSearch uses DataTables, so it takes care of multiple pages of results, and offers a search field for an additional level of search within the results that occurs in real-time in your browser.

This new search engine also makes it easier for us to add new collections than the way we had it programmed previously. Not much has happened here at JGIRC, according to our blog, but we have been working on some new things and they are coming soon.