Armed Forces Emergency Services

The American Red Cross continues to provide vital services to members of the military through our Armed Forces Emergency Services program, which serves as the key communications link between servicemen and -women and their families at home. We send messages about important news, such as a child’s birth, a serious illness or the death of a loved one anywhere in the world, including ships at sea, embassies and isolated military units.

The Red Cross holds “Get to Know Us Before You Need Us” briefings at troop mobilizations to inform service members and their families about how we can help them.

“When we go out to military bases to talk about how we help service members, many of them are surprised at what we do,” said Red Cross volunteer Kela Harrington.  “I’ve also met people at briefings who’ve used our services in the past and came up to say thank you.  One soldier’s family had been in a car accident while he was stationed abroad and the Red Cross was able to find him in the field and arranged for him to get home.”

Another one of the thousands we helped was a serviceman whose wife went into premature labor during Fleet Week in New York and delivered their first child on May 31.   While the baby was kept in the hospital for observation after the surprise delivery, the Red Cross helped find the parents housing and arranged to loan them money to pay for their lodging.

Tracing Services and Project Search

Families separated by war, civil disturbance, natural disasters or changing world conditions can come to the Red Cross for help finding and reconnecting with their loved ones. The Red Cross sends messages, assists in emigration, issues travel documents, provides casework services and obtains information on the health and welfare of close relatives.  When hurricanes affected numerous southern states this year, we helped a variety of New Yorkers reconnect with family members they’d lost touch with during the disasters.

The American Red Cross of Greater New York's Project Search Tracing program specializes in helping thousands of people search for what happened to relatives lost during the Holocaust. The search can reveal the date of a family member’s death, provide certification for reparations and/or pensions to civilian survivors and, in some special cases, can even reunite family members separated during World War II.

Recently, we helped an 87-year-old man from the Ukraine who had lost touch with his 94-year-old sister in 2001. The siblings - a widow and a widower - had been in contact since the sister's release from German captivity after World War II. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, however, the correspondence suddenly stopped and her brother immediately became concerned. The Red Cross conducted a health and welfare inquiry and discovered that his sister had been hospitalized and put into a nursing home. We ran a trace to find where she was staying and we are currently working on re-establishing communication between the siblings.

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