This is an excerpt from the book Gathering Leaves by D. M. DeBacker>

In the previous chapters, I have described how I have had great success in piecing together the history of family using a variety of research tools available to the family historian. The National Archives & Records Administration (NARA) web site provides a description of the US government records that are available to genealogists. NARA has immigration records, also known as "ship passenger arrival records", for arrivals to the United States between 1820 and 1982. Land Records are available. These are records that document the transfer of public lands from the U.S. Government to private ownership. There are over ten million such individual land transactions in the custody of the National Archives. These case files cover land entries in all 30 public land states. The holdings include Federal military service records from the Revolutionary War to 1912 at the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C. Military records from WWI - present are held in the National Military Personnel Records Center (NPRC), in St. Louis, Missouri. Naturalization records for Federal Courts are available, but prior to 1906, any municipal, county, state, or Federal court could grant U.S. citizenship, so those records might be found at the relevant State Archives.