March 21, 2011 · 6:17 pm
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A World War Two Mystery


Neighborhood fingerprint station Fingerprints are your identification and protection during wartime – have the entire family take theirs now! : War Identification Bureau – CDVO

I’ve never heard of this before. Wikipedia and Google came up blank.

Did these really exist?

UPDATE: Solved by elandes on Twitter, who sent me this link, which explains:

In July 1940, the federal government ordered all citizens to report to their local post office to be fingerprinted and the FBI accumulated a large number of citizen fingerprints.

Ah, the Post Office. That makes sense now.

2 Comments

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2 responses to “A World War Two Mystery”

  1. laura
    March 22, 2011 at 2:42 am

    Interesting indeed! I wasn’t aware of this either. Unfortunately that link gives more information about the Federal Art Project than about the effort to collect fingerprint data on US citizens. It’d be interesting to have more information about that. Related government records should be available, shouldn’t they?

    Reply

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