About this archive

About Valor Record

Valor Record is an unofficial archive. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Department of Defense, any military service, any government agency, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, or the National Medal of Honor Museum.

The name of the site is set in one file, src/site.ts, so it can be changed without rewriting the pages. The archive does not use the Medal of Honor as a logo and does not use official seals.

What is in this version

• 3,503 people
• 3,520 awards
• 17 people with more than one award in this dataset
• 626 awards marked posthumous
• 1,418 people with a verified reusable photograph (40.5%)
• 3,080 people with a home state read from the citation entry
• 1,632 battle and action pages, including 9 curated hubs

Public counts in 2025–2026 are usually given as more than 3,500 awards, about 3,526 people after the January 3, 2025 ceremony, with further awards in 2026. This archive counts one row per award in the U.S. Army citation index plus Army general orders that were not already in that index. Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Coast Guard awards are included when the Army index carries them. Rescinded 1917 awards are not included.

Sources

The roster and citation text come from the U.S. Army Medal of Honor citation index, a public-domain government compilation that includes Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Coast Guard awards: army.mil/medalofhonor/recipients.html. The pipeline stores a snapshot of each campaign page because some clients are refused by the live site, and it can refresh those snapshots from the Internet Archive. Awards published after a snapshot are added from Army general orders on the Army Publishing Directorate, which are also government works. Each profile links to the source used for that citation.

Wikipedia and Wikidata are used only to match a photograph and to offer a background link. Wikipedia prose is not copied. Wikimedia material is credited under its own license, including CC BY-SA where that is the license on the file. A profile with a Creative Commons photo names the license, the credit, and the file page.

This project does not copy portraits or prose from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, the National Medal of Honor Museum, Home of Heroes, Military Times, or Honoring American Troops. Linking to them from a curated battle page is limited to pages that were checked; the citation text itself is taken from government sources.

Photographs

A photo is shown only when the person in the file is the recipient and the file may be reused. The first pass used Wikidata images on Wikimedia Commons. A later pass added portraits from the National Archives Catalog, the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs catalog, and additional Commons files. The license has to be public domain, CC0, or Creative Commons Attribution, including ShareAlike. Non-commercial and fair-use files are left out. Graves, medals, documents, group pictures, and files that do not name this recipient are left out. If no such file matches, the page says: “No verified public-domain photo is on file yet.” The archive does not use generated or restored likenesses.

Gaps

• Public totals are usually given as more than 3,500 awards and about 3,526 people after the January 3, 2025 ceremony, with further awards in 2026. This archive currently holds 3,503 people and 3,520 awards. Added from public Navy, Marine Corps, Army, and DVIDS releases: James Capers Jr., John W. Ripley, Elmer Royce Williams, and Nicholas Dockery. The Unknown Americans of World War II and Korea are included from the Army’s special-legislation page. Some older general-order scans were still too garbled to publish, and a few citation-index entries could not be parsed.
• The 1917 review rescinded hundreds of earlier awards. Those rescinded awards are not in the Army citation index and are not republished here. Restored awards, including Mary Edwards Walker, remain when the index includes them.
• Home state is taken from “accredited to,” “entered service at,” or the birth line when one of those names a U.S. state. 423 people have no state in the source line.
• Posthumous status is marked when the index puts an asterisk by the name or the citation says the person was killed or gave their life. Older entries do not always say so. The filter is labeled as a marker, not as a complete list of who lived.
• Place names are the words in the citation entry, lightly cleaned. Some naval citations name a ship instead of a town. Curated hubs correct the famous battles; other pages follow the entry.
• Only the curated hubs have checked articles, footage, books, and films. Other action pages say that media has not been curated yet. Footage is linked, never copied onto this site.

Cadences

Optional background calls are excerpts of U.S. military public-affairs recordings published on DVIDS with the public-domain mark and no note of copyrighted music. They never start on their own. Credits and units are on the cadence audio page.

Build

The site is a static Astro project. On Render, use build command npm ci && npm run build and publish directory dist. Regenerate the dataset with python3 scripts/build_dataset.py.