Form WRA-26 was designed as a census of the inmates as they entered the ten main WRA camps in 1942-1943. It contains information about each individual, including birthdate, original address, education, occupation and citizenship status. It also provides the "Family No." and "Individual No." which were unique identifiers used to track people held in the WRA system. The paper forms, filled out by a core of interviewers most of whom were inmates themselves, were recorded to punchcard format in 1943. The data has been migrated and retranscribed several times since, and is now freely available through the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the Japanese American National Museum, Ancestry and other organizations.

The Final Accountability Rosters (FAR) were created as a snapshot of the inmate population as the WRA camps were winding down operations in late 1945-1946. Using a ledger-style format, information about individuals who had been incarcerated in the camp, including the reason for release and exit destination, was recorded at each of the ten WRA camps. Notably, however, the survey fields were not common across all of the camps. For example, the WRA-assigned "Individual No." and "Camp Address" (the block, barrack and apartment unit) were omitted from some of the camp FARs. In total, twelve ledgers were compiled as both Heart Mountain and Tule Lake produced two volumes. The FARs are available as microfilm reproductions of the paper documents through the NARA, and are also online through Ancestry and several other sites.

For further information and historical background, see, "Records about Japanese Americans relocated during World War II," in the Densho Encyclopedia.

About the Datasets

The raw datasets that feed the DDR Names Registry were collected from several different sources detailed below. Densho processed each of the datasets prior to ingesting it into the system. Fields and field values such as state names were normalized where possible, and some basic data cleanup was performed. However, the quality of the data varies widely due to errors in the original recording and subsequent transcriptions that occurred over time. In particular, names may have been misspelled, and in the case of some datasets, entire fields from the original were omitted by the transcribers. There are also duplicate and incomplete rows.

Because of privacy concerns, full birthdates were converted to display only the birth year. Though the information appears in the original NARA microfilm images and also in other on-line searchable versions of the data, Densho made a conscious decision to remove this personally identifiable information.

With the exception of the Ancestry data, each dataset may be downloaded individually in CSV format for use under a CC0 public-domain license grant dedication. The datasets are still undergoing quality-check and as mistakes are corrected, the files will be updated. As additional individual camp FARs are transcribed, they will be made available as well.