How can I find a picture of James Harvey Tomlin, korean war, Army?

 MissTeri 

Thank you for posting your question on History Hub!

According to the Military, boot camp photos and graduates’ formal photos (both individual and group), were taken by private local commercial photographers and offered for sale at the time taken. Unfortunately those items never became part of official military records nor were they retained by the commercial photographers responsible for shooting the photos.

The Still Picture Branch does have many candid photos of U.S. Military personnel but in most of them there is no identification of the people shown. That said, we do have various name indexes that are arranged by branch of service and filed alphabetically by last name. Several of those name indexes have been digitized and made available through the NARA Catalog. For pre-1955 Army personnel, you will need to search 111-PX: Index to Personalities in the U.S. Army Signal Corps Photographic Files. A tutorial on how to use the Army, WWII and Korea digitized section can be found at: https://unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov/2020/05/12/how-to-search-still-photographs-for-army-personalities/ 

If you locate a listing for James H. Tomlin, you may email stillpix@nara.gov to receive preview scans. If you do not find his name in the index, that means we do not have any photos where he is specifically identified. 

Please note that we also checked the post-1954 Army name index for the name James Harvey Tomlin but did not locate any listings. There was one listing for a 1st Lt. James R. Tomlin but the middle initial does not match and the photo was taken in 1958 at Fort Gordon.

If you have not done so already, you can also request his Official Military Personnel File (OMPF). It is possible that a photograph could be attached to the OMPF. For more information about how to request personnel records from the National Archives' National Personnel Record Center (NPRC), please visit our website here: https://www.archives.gov/veterans. Specifically, members of the military who separated between 1961-present can be found at the NPRC, while those who separated between 1912-1960 can be found at the National Archives at St. Louis.