Modus Operandi -- How we found you Locating the ASTP vets after an interval of 55 years has been a wonderful, backbreaking, frustrating experience made worthwhile by the response from our long-lost friends. Most of the detective work was done by Brock Corbin, whose bulldog tenacity was matched by his willingness to spend long days on the phone running up astronomical bills. His leads were organized into these Web pages by Steve Wright. Our primary source was a roster supplied by Bill Hollandsworth, showing the personnel at the end of the Basic Phase, Jan. 29, 1944. In December, 1999 it was supplemented by tranfer orders for May 1943 obtained from the SUI ASTP archives. The fact that they showed middle initials as well as first and last names was of crucial importance. We used two Web tools to find people: Phone searches (Netscape People Finder, Yahoo People Search, Anywho). The middle initial let us concentrate on calling the most likely candidates. SSDI - Social Security Death Index (Ancestry.com, Kindred Connections). Finding matching names with plausible birth dates (1918-1925) and no live contacts allowed us to build the "In Memoriam" section. Unfortunately the SSDI does not include midddle initials so we can't guarantee 100%, but many of the listings were verified by widows or classmates. In addition, some people were located by Hollandsworth via the VA Archives in St. Louis; others through classmates who supplied phone numbers. As of 12-06-00, about 40 of the 494 people on the roster still have not been located; they are listed on the "Desperately Seeking" page. Many of these have common names that have too many matches for our tools; many don't match anything; others haven't answered at the listed phones. We appreciate any help in locating them.

Finding Private Diley Marilee Schroeder of Illinois was recently using the search engine Google to locate the rock group Stone Temple Pilots, aka STP. She got a hit on our ASTP site and became engrossed with the history and the photos, and spent over 2 hours looking at it. In reading the list of the men we were seeking she saw a name that she recognized. George R. Diley is her former father-in-law.