Finding Navy Reunions Reunion groups make themselves known in many ways. There's no single listing of all the reunions that take place, but if your ship or unit has a reunon group, and if you look in the right places, you're very likely to find it. Here are some of the most useful and accessible places to look: 1) Internet Searches are very effective. With the widespread use of computers, most reunion groups have some sort of presence on the Internet. Many have web sites, others are mentioned on web sites that deal with the Navy or Navy reunions. Using Google or another search engine, enter the name of the ship and the word reunion, and see what comes up. If there's a reunion for your ship, you'll often find it on the first page of hits. If you get a lot of hits that don't apply to your ship, you can narrow the search by enclosing the ship's name in quotation marks, such as "USS Rankin" the word reunion should appear outside the quotes. 2) Military Web Sites often have reunion sections. Since these sites are constantly changing, the best strategy is to visit their home page and look for the reunions section. Here are a few sites that we've found useful: NavSource Online has photos of almost every Navy ship, and displays reunion information for many of them. To find it, go to your ship's page and scroll to the very bottom. You can visit the NavSource home page by clicking here. The U.S. Navy Memorial Association  claims to have contact with thousands of Navy reunion groups. Visit their home page by clicking here.   Military Network keeps extensive lists of reunions on their web site, but it takes some work to find them. When you get to their home page, look to the far left for a long list of other pages. Click on the item labeled Association Lists, and you'll go to a page listing many categories of reunions. Find the right category and search for the ship you are interested in. Click here to visit Military Network.  3) Navy and Military Magazines often publish extensive lists of reunions. They're good places to find reunions that aren't very visible on the Internet. Most of the magazines allow only one listing per reunion per year, so it's good to look at every month's issue. You can sometimes find collections of back issues at public libraries, but if you can't, you can often find a local unit of the organization that publishes the magazine. Failing that, you can try to find a local member who's willing to share his magazine. Some magazines may also have online versions that include the reunion information. Here are some magazines that are particularly useful for finding reunions. Let us know if we've left a good one out: The American Legion Magazine, a  monthly magazine for members. VFW Magazine, a monthly magazine for members. Shift Colors, a quarterly newsletter mailed by the Navy to all retirees. Naval Affairs, the monthly magazine of the Fleet Reserve Association. DAV Magazine, a monthly magazine for members. Organizing a Reunion Organizing your own reunion can be an extremely rewarding activity. And once you've had your first reunion, it can be followed by others in a string that can go on for years. There's a lot of work in organizing a reunion, and fortunately a lot of help is available at little or no charge. The basic decision is whether to "do it yourself," or to hire a reunion planning company. Excellent assistance in "doing it yourself" is available from THE Reunion Network and elsewhere. Reunion planning companies can be found through Internet searches for terms like 'military reunion planners'. One of the best of these companies is Military Locator & Reunion Service, Inc., which we have used to plan and manage our first three reunions. They have the skills and market power to negotiate good prices for hotels and tours, and in our experience the savings they get exceeds the cost of their services. Their greatest benefit is that they do all the work at the reunion itself, so the members and officials can focus on enjoying the reunion. The USS Rankin Association began by locating a few individual shipmates, and we quickly moved into having a reunion of our own. When we started, we knew the names and addresses of exactly three former shipmates. A year later, we knew the names of all 3,866 men who had served aboard the ship from 1945-1971, and we had been in touch with 1,206 of them, both living and deceased, including all but one of the 437 officers. Every one of these men is happy that we found him, and many of them have given us generous financial support. The secret to our success was acquiring a set of official rosters of the ship's company. Enlisted and officer rosters from WWII through 1970 are kept at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. Anyone can access them, but it requires specific knowledge to do so. Our publication "How to Get Copies of Navy Crew Lists" provides that specific knowledge in a format that anyone can use. It includes sample pages from actual records in the Archives. Click Here to learn more. To learn more about our experiences in finding former shipmates, send email or call Skip Sander at (412) 367-1376 (Eastern time zone).