Disclaimer

This wiki publishes historical research on Camp Ritchie trainees. Content is provided as-is for education and family research.

It continues the public research begun by Daniel (Dan) Gross. It is meant for surviving Ritchie Boys, their families, and anyone interested in their history. Much is still unknown.

Not an official record

This wiki is not an official page of the Ritchie History Museum.

We do not have direct access to official military records. While we do maintain some information related to individuals who were stationed at Camp Ritchie, these records are often limited, and in many cases families may already possess more detailed information than we do.

Biographies and research notes are not official U.S. Army records. Nothing on this wiki comes from a single authoritative database. Pages are built by combining several kinds of material, then edited in the open like any wiki.

Entries can be wrong

This project is maintained in good faith, with the goal of honoring the Ritchie Boys and making research easier. That does not mean the data is correct. Infobox fields, biographies, gallery captions, and research notes can all be wrong, incomplete, or out of date.

Anyone can edit most pages here without an account. Well-intentioned edits can introduce new mistakes; vandalism or careless changes are possible too. Text you read today may change tomorrow.

When accuracy matters — for genealogy, legal purposes, media, or publications — check primary sources yourself: National Archives military personnel files, unit histories, contemporaneous newspapers, published memoirs, and museum holdings. Cite the underlying record, not this wiki alone. Wiki text can change.

Roster fields may contain transcription errors. NARA data itself can contain transcription errors, missing men, or fields that do not align cleanly with later research. The collapsed technical section on a soldier page is not a full NARA record dump.

Class roster data (Classes 1–31 only). The class, section, and related roster fields for Classes 1–31 come from U.S. government training-roster records held by the National Archives. Camp Ritchie Museum, Inc. (also known as The Ritchie History Museum) digitized that material and made it available for this project. The underlying records are public-domain government information; the museum does not own the data. Please credit the museum as the digitization source when citing this roster. That dataset is separate from Dan Gross's research files and from material created by this wiki's maintainers. We have tried to catch errors, but mistakes and omissions remain possible; not every person who trained at Camp Ritchie appears in this data. On the original theritchieboys.com site, this material was a separate searchable class roster database. On this wiki it is integrated into soldier profiles, class pages, and related navigation. Attribution to the museum applies to that Classes 1–31 roster data (class/section assignments and related roster fields), not to biographies, photographs, research notes, timelines, or other content on the site. Broader limits on biographies, photographs, and other site content are explained on About the data.

Dan Gross's Excel timeline and roster work was never a formal archival finding aid. Typos, duplicate names, and uncertain matches were part of the working process. A yellow Record status: unconfirmed banner means the class-roster match is not high confidence. Treat those infobox class fields as a lead to check, not as settled fact.

Research notes on soldier pages may be unverified. They are a working file, not a verified biography. They may be unverified, incomplete, or incorrect, and should not be treated as established fact. Later notes may come from OCR, family contributions, or other cited research and should be judged by their own source.

Material brought over from the Ritchie Boys of WWII Facebook page was written for social media, not for archival citation. Posts may repeat family lore, omit context, or attach the wrong image to a name. Errors may remain.

Information from families is not automatically verified. Proposed facts from document OCR are never written to a profile automatically. Software and AI-assisted drafts are meant to save editor time, not to certify accuracy. They can misread or misstate what they were given.

How to send a correction

Anyone can correct factual errors on a soldier page (see Contribute). If you have a source, correct the page or explain the change on its talk page. Prefer a sourced correction over silently deleting a research note.

For private or sensitive material — Social Security numbers, street addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, or other living-person contact details that should not be public — use Contact Us and describe the page and the text or file to remove. We treat those requests as priority corrections. The form on that page reaches the project team that maintains this wiki, not the Ritchie History Museum.

See also

• About the data
• About
• Privacy policy
• Contact Us
• Contribute
• FAQ