DD Form 1074 occupies a particular place in Defense recordkeeping. Its title is DD Form 1074, Questionnaire of Local Inhabitants, July 1998, and it exists to Questionnaire of Local Inhabitants. What the DD prefix records is an administrative judgment made long before your copy was printed: this transaction was determined to be common to the whole Department rather than peculiar to one service, and so the documentation of it was standardized at Department level.
That decision has consequences you will notice. Because not stated prescribes the form for the Department as a whole, and not stated maintains it on the Department's behalf, the same blank passes between the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marine Corps, the Space Force, the Coast Guard when operating under Defense jurisdiction, the defense agencies and the combatant commands without translation. A clerk in one component reads a record created in another and finds the fields where they expect them.
You are looking for edition not stated, listed as not stated. Department-wide supersession is a single event rather than a rollout, which is what distinguishes edition currency on a DD form from the same question on a service publication: nobody anywhere is still accepting the previous version out of habit.
The form is laid out top to bottom in a sequence that reflects how the record will be read, not merely how it was drawn. Identification comes first because everything below it is understood in relation to a named person, unit or transaction; substantive entries follow; certification closes the document because certification attests to what precedes it. Filling out of order tends to produce internal inconsistencies — an entry that made sense before the header was settled and does not afterward.
Verify the printed edition against not stated first. Field structure shifts between editions, and the office that receives your record is reading the current one. That office may sit outside your service, which removes even the informal accommodation you might expect from a colleague who used the old version last month.
Where a specific field is genuinely unclear, the instructions printed on the form come first and not stated governs where the two do not agree.
Download the form
Formats available: PDF, across 1 pages and about 40 fields. That several formats coexist is a consequence of scale — the Department cannot standardize the software on every desk that needs this form, so it standardizes the document instead.
The difference between a fillable and a printable pdf is a difference in what the file contains. A fillable release carries an interactive layer: each box is a defined field with a name and a data type, and what you type is stored as data inside the document. A printable release has no such layer — it is an image of the page, and the only place your answers can go is onto paper. The distinction matters downstream, because a Department record often gets scanned and forwarded several times before it reaches its final file, and typed characters survive that chain in a way pen strokes do not.
The xfdl file is a survival from an earlier phase of Defense form automation. Xfdl is the IBM Lotus Forms format, and for a long period it was the Department's standard for electronic forms — fielded broadly enough that it still appears in distribution sets today. It opens in IBM Lotus Forms Viewer or a compatible client and nowhere else; a pdf reader will report it as damaged, which is not a fault in the file.
All of it downloads without charge. Where care is needed is in the reader you choose. A fillable pdf depends on field properties that desktop applications honour and browser previews frequently ignore, so work locally rather than inside a browser window.
What the form asks for
- 1. Person interviewed: a. Name: last, first, middle initial.
- 1.b. Address of person interviewed.
- 1.c. Occupation of person interviewed.
- 1.d. Date interviewed: four digit year, two digit month, two digit day.
- 2.a. Are there remains believed to be U.S. forces interred in this area? Press space bar to mark X in first box if yes, second box if no.
- 2.c. Date of death: four digit year, two digit month, two digit day.
- 2.d. Date of interment: four digit year, two digit month, two digit day.
- 2.b. Who interred the remains?
- 2.e. Where were the remains interred? Include grid coordinates.
- 3.a. Are there remains believed to be U.S. forces above ground in this area? X first box if yes, second box if no.
- 3.b. Who found the remains?
- 3.c. Where are the remains now? Include grid coordinates.
- 3.d. Date of death: four digit year, two digit month, two digit day.
- 4. Was the person who found the remains a witness to the death? X first box if yes, second box if no.
- 5. Were remains recovered from an aircraft or armored vehicle? X first box if yes, second box if no.
- 5. If yes, describe type of vehicle, marking, and crew position.
- 6. Is the area where remains are located mined and/or boobytrapped? X first box if yes, second box if no.
- 7.a. Were the remains tentatively identified prior to burial? X first box if yes, second box if no.
- 7.b.1. Name of person who tentatively identified the remains: last name, first, middle initial.
- 7.b.2. Title of person identifying remains.
- 7.b.3. Address of person identifying remains.
- 8.a. Were personal effects recovered with remains? X first box if yes, second box if no.
- 8.b. Where are effects now?
- 9.a. Was government property found and/or recovered with remains? X first box if yes, second box if no.
The completed form goes to the office named in not stated or in local implementing procedure, and it is worth keeping a copy before it goes. On a Department form the destination is frequently outside your own chain — another service, a defense agency, a joint staff — and recovering a document that has crossed an organizational boundary is a slower business than retrieving one from a file down the hall.
When DD Form 1074 cites another form, the citation is self-sufficient. The DD series is a single sequence administered at Department level, so the number resolves to exactly one document without any need to establish which component issued it — a convenience that exists only because the sequence was never allowed to fork.
Procedures that touch both Department and service processes will cite forms from both sequences, and the coincidence of numbers between them is exactly that — coincidence. An Army proponent maintains the DA series for the Army; not stated or another Department office maintains the DD series for the whole Department. Two independent registries, two independent numbering runs, no correspondence at any value.
Understanding why editions change explains why checking them is not optional. Revision follows directive reissue, changes in what data is required, and amendments to mandatory notice text — decisions made at Department level and communicated through publication rather than notification. The file you saved does not update itself, so the edition date at download is what you rely on.
What you have here is the document and a description of it, which is a different thing from guidance. This page is not an organ of the Department, gives no legal or procedural advice, and makes no representation about the outcome of any filing; the offices that administer the requirement are the only ones positioned to answer that. Applicability, eligibility and procedural questions belong to not stated, to your servicing personnel office, or to the office designated in not stated.
Questions and answers
- What is DD Form 1074?
- DD Form 1074, Questionnaire of Local Inhabitants, July 1998
- Which edition is current?
- Not stated by the publisher
- Who is responsible for this form?
- Not stated
- In which formats can it be downloaded?