YMCA World War I Service Punch Cards, United States, 1917-1919

In the course of staffing its assigned operations and the other activities in support of the armed forces during World War I, the American Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) recruited a grand total of 25,926 workers who, about equally divided between home and overseas assignments, served under the auspices of the organization. A partially machine-readable punch card was generated for each worker, including some or all of the following data: name, gender (men are on buff cards, women on white), African American Y/N (blue cards), year of birth, address, occupation, work placement, placement date, salary, date left or returned, qualifications, religion, placed home versus overseas, marital status, and education. The cards, which total approximately 27,600 including cross-reference cards, were digitized by the University of Minnesota Libraries and subsequently transcribed and indexed by FamilySearch International. The datasets include:

• DS1: Decoded data from all 27,000+ punch cards, including the name of the scanned image file that corresponds to that record
• DS2: Technical metadata for the digital scans
• DS3: Transcribed data from crowdsourcing via the Zooniverse platform

Additionally, there is a zip package that contains the scanned images of all 27,000+ punch cards