A side discussion arose about other records sets that are associated with specific dates. In the United States, some individual states have state censuses, often on the years ending in 5. There are other non-census records sets that I mentioned, and I wanted to leave some information here for Mike and other users on the forum for reference.
But if I had to put an over-arching question on the topic, I would ask: how do you determine which tasks are better suited to custom queries and which want to be plugins?
In the USA, there are two different series of draft registration cards available on sites like Ancestry / Fold3, FamilySearch, and perhaps others. The first is the Word War 1 Draft registrations. These were associated with three different card formats and four different registration dates.
From the US National Archives website: https://www.archives.gov/research/milit ... gistration
The situation for the World War 2 Draft Registration cards is even more complicated, with seven different registration dates. Judy G. Russell summarized the dates in her blog post https://www.legalgenealogist.com/2015/0 ... -training/, from information that was on fold3:During World War I there were three registrations. The first, on June 5, 1917, was for all men between the ages of 21 and 31. The second, on June 5, 1918, registered those who attained age 21 after June 5, 1917. (A supplemental registration was held on August 24, 1918, for those becoming 21 years old after June 5, 1918. This was included in the second registration.) The third registration was held on September 12, 1918, for men age 18 through 45.
There is a good deal of overlap between the WW1 Draft Registrations and the Fourth Registraton for WW2 (the "Old Man's Draft"). This registration collected information that was not necessarily for service in combat but for other tasks that might be useful for the war effort.
- First Registration – October 16, 1940: “over 16 million men between the ages of 21 and 36, registered at local draft boards around the country.”
- Second Registration – July 1, 1941: “men who had reached the age of 21 since the first registration.”
- Third Registration – February 16, 1942: “For men 20-21 and 35-44 years (born on or after February 17, 1897 and on or before December 31, 1921).”
- Fourth Registration, “Old Man’s Draft” – April 27, 1942: “men who were 45 to 64 years old at the time.”
- Fifth Registration – June 30, 1942: “Men 18-20 years.”
- Sixth registration – December 10-31, 1942: “Men who had reached the age of 18 years after June 30, 1942.”
- “Extra Registration” – November 16-December 31, 1943: “American men living abroad, 18-44 years old.”
So the task would be, find the men in the US, of particular ages, alive during the registration periods, who might be eligible for these record sets, and then, by analogy with the Lookup Missing Census Records, find the people whose records you haven't yet found. Is it worth it to build a custom plugin, or would this be better as a custom query for eligible men, whose results the user could perhaps send to a Named List or other research plan as a checklist?
The other consderation: at what point does a record set become too small to be worth making a plugin for? The WW1 Draft registrations consist of 24,000,000 cards. Fold3's portal page for the WW2 cards gives a number of 35,673,073 records.
