Reading old records
A tool that cannot read your file will tell you your file is empty
This deserves its own page because it is where most document tools quietly fail, and where the failure is invisible to the person it hurts.
The reality
What a 1968 service record actually looks like
Typed on a manual typewriter. Photocopied several times. Stored in a warehouse for decades. Scanned in bulk by a contractor, and stamped along the way. Handwriting in the margins. Pages at an angle. Ink that has faded into the paper.
A tool that only handles clean digital documents will read those pages as blank and report that you have no evidence. And you would have no way of knowing the difference between your file does not contain this and we could not read your file.
Those are completely different problems, and only one of them is yours to fix.
Illustrative example. Page quality is graded explicitly so the third case is reported rather than counted as missing evidence.
What we do instead
Every page gets assessed, and the assessment is part of the answer
Claim Assistant classifies document quality explicitly and tells you which it is.
Scan or digital text
Whether the page carries a real text layer or is an image of paper that has to be recognized character by character.
Recognition confidence
How certain the character recognition is on this specific page, which determines how much weight a finding from it can carry.
What kind of document it is
Based on its contents rather than its filename, which matters because old records are routinely misfiled under useless names.
Why it matters three times over
That assessment does three separate jobs
It routes the page
A clean 2022 PDF and a 1971 carbon copy are different problems and go down different processing lanes.
It weights the finding
A match read off a badly degraded page does not carry the same confidence as one read off a clean report.
It surfaces in your results
A page that could not be read is reported as a page that could not be read. Never silently dropped, and never counted as an absence of evidence.
The point
If a critical document is unreadable, that is something you can act on.
You can request a cleaner copy from the National Personnel Records Center. You can ask a provider to reissue a report. You can track down the unit member whose statement went missing.
You cannot act on a gap you were never told about.
Next step
Your oldest records are often the ones that matter most
In-service evidence is what establishes service connection. It is also the evidence most likely to be sitting in a degraded scan nobody has read.