How it works

Organize by the person, not the object.

Every record in Valor Registry is a service member. You give them a name and whatever you know of their service — service numbers, ranks, unit, branch, country, era — and their medals, ribbons and badges hang off that record. A record can also be an unattributed group: medals you hold whose recipient is not yet known.

That inversion matters. A drawer of medals is an inventory; a list of people and what each of them earned is a history. Groups let you organize records however suits your collection: by family, by conflict, by regiment.

Keep the story attached to the medal.

For each person you can record dates and places of birth and death, a biography, research notes, and what happened to them in service — killed, missing, wounded, taken prisoner, mentioned in despatches.

For each medal you record where it came from. Provenance, what you paid, and where it is kept are private to you and never shown to anyone else; a separate public-provenance note is there if you want to publish part of the history.

Find the people who share a service member.

Your collection is private by default. If you turn on discoverability, other users can find your records by name, service details and era, and send you a contact request — you decide whether to accept.

That is how a collector holding a medal finds the family that lost it, and how two researchers working the same unit find each other. You can link related records — a father and son, a crew, brothers — so the connection is kept.

Work from the archive, and track what is still unknown.

Heritage Data Labs runs a free public archive of more than eleven million US and Allied service records and medal citations at medalsearch.net. Look your service member up there, and bring what you find into their record.

Each record carries a research status — unresearched, partially researched, or fully researched — and a note of whether the official service file has been obtained, so you always know where the gaps are.