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Subject: Re: Finding who is in military issued photos
Author: infosending1
Date: Tuesday, July 07, 2015
Classification: Query
Surnames:

Ancestry must be on the blink again, as per usual. The edit symbol has disappeared, so I can't insert this into the previous message, so I'll add it here.

I forgot to mention, if you can view a larger version of any of your pics, the collar badges on an their shirt or tunic will tell you what branch of service a man was in.

That's those circular brass discs on their collars, the one on their right is the letters U.S. the one on their left is the branch of service insignia, infantry is two crossed rifles, artillery is two crossed cannon barrels, engineers is a castle.

Identifying any individuals in such pictures is a real long shot, the only way I can imagine to achieve that is if there are any formal unit group pictures that were taken at the end of their training or before they shipped out, sometimes such pictures contain the names of the people in the pictures.

I'm sure that it's obvious that the white ship with the windows is one of the San Francisco Bay Ferries and the island of course is Alcatraz.

Some of the pictures were obviously taken on a ferry, but most of them would be on a troopship, it's probably a civilian vessel rather than a USAT because of the funnel bands, with a bit of effort it would probably be possible to identify the shipping line by the ship's funnel markings.

A whole WW2 U.S. Army Division would be about 15,000 men plus a lot of vehicles and artillery guns, and lots of equipment and stores, a whole Division certainly wouldn't fir into one ship.

My guesstimate is that all of those men are from one of the sub units within the Division, possibly one of the artillery regiments.

Some of the people in the pictures are wearing white peaked caps, they are ship's officers.
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