If You Have These 15 Haitian Surnames — U.S. Draft Records Reveal Where Your Bloodline Began

In 1917, the United States government required every man living on its soil, citizen or not, to register for the draft. That meant Haitian men, many of them living in New York, Philadelphia, and South Florida, decades before the great waves of Haitian migration most people know about today, had to walk into a local draft board and write down, by hand, their name, their birthplace, and the exact town in Haiti they came from. Those cards still exist, sitting in the National Archives today, digitized and searchable. Fifteen surnames, counting down, straight from them. This video covers 15 real Haitian men documented in the 1917–1918 U.S. World War I Draft Registration, from Cap-Haïtien, Port-de-Paix, and Miragoâne to Sailes, Fils, Auguste, and Beauvoir; how the timing lines up directly with the start of the U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1915; a possible connection to Charles Moravia, a real Haitian poet, journalist, and diplomat of the same era; and how a government form built to track potential soldiers accidentally preserved exactly the kind of detail, a name, a birthplace, a year, a family researcher needs most a century later. One honest note: these cards prove a specific man with a specific name was living in the U.S. in 1917 — not a direct line to any modern family carrying the same surname today. If you want to know whether one of tonight's names connects to your own family, our surname and record research service is built for exactly that — the link is pinned in the comments below. We go directly into the surviving draft records, ship manifests, and census documents for your specific surname, and tell you honestly what they show. Drop your surname and family's town in Haiti in the comments if you know it. We've now traced Haiti's story from the African coast, through the revolution, and into its earliest documented presence in the United States. If you want us to keep tracing this migration forward into later decades next, tell us in the comments. Subscribe if uncovering the real, documented history hidden inside the African and Caribbean diaspora matters to you. Sources: — United States, World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917–1918, FamilySearch Historical Records (National Archives, RG 147). — "Ancestors from the West Indies," Damani Davis, National Archives Prologue Magazine. — Historical documentation of the United States occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934. — Historical documentation of Charles Moravia. #HaitianHistory #HaitianAmerican #Genealogy