DD Form 137-7 occupies a particular place in Defense recordkeeping. Its title is DD Form 137-7, Dependency Statement - Ward of a Court, and it exists to Dependency Statement - Ward of a Court ( Instructions ). 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.
This is why the arrangement matters to you rather than only to the archivists. not stated governs the form throughout the Department, with not stated as the responsible office, so the record you create is legible outside your own component. Joint assignments, agency details and cross-service transactions all depend on that: the paperwork does not have to be reconstructed each time it crosses a boundary.
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.
Before the first entry, compare the date printed on the form face with not stated. This is not bureaucratic fussiness. Editions change field numbering, and a receiving office working from the current layout may look for information where your copy does not put it. On a Department form the exposure is wider than usual: your record may be reviewed by an office in another service entirely, one with no reason to remember what the previous edition looked like.
Unclear entries are resolved from the printed instructions first and from not stated where the two texts diverge.
Download the form
The set published here is PDF, covering 5 pages with roughly 200 fields. More than one format survives because the Department serves users under very different conditions, from a desk with current software to a location where a printer is the only reliable output.
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.
Xfdl appears in the set for reasons of institutional inertia rather than preference. It is the IBM Lotus Forms format, once the Department's electronic forms standard and deployed widely enough that it outlived the decision to move on. IBM Lotus Forms Viewer or an equivalent client opens it; a pdf application will not.
Nothing here is charged for. Published Defense forms are public documents and distribution carries no fee, in any format. One caution about software: fill the form in a desktop pdf application rather than a browser tab. Browser-embedded viewers implement field behaviour inconsistently, and the failure mode is silent loss of everything you entered.
What the form asks for
- 1. Entitlements requested. a. Type. Press space bar to mark X if B A H.
- Mark X if Travel Allowance.
- Mark X if U S I P card.
- 1.b. First application? X first box if yes, second box if no.
- If no, give date of last application. Four digit year, two digit month, two digit day.
- c. Last application was: X first box if approved, second box if disapproved.
- 2.Member information. a. Name (Last, First, Middle Initial).
- 2.b. DoD ID Number.
- 2.c. Rank.
- d. Status. X first box if active duty, second box if retired, third box if national guard, fourth box if reserve.
- X first box if Army, second box if Marine Corps, third box if Navy, fourth box if Air Force.
- Mark X if deceased.
- If deceased: Date of death (Four digit year, two digit month, two digit day).
- Mark X if other status.
- Specify other status.
- 2.e. Complete residence address (Street, apartment number, city, state and zip code).
- 2.f. Complete military address (include assignment, squadron and base).
- 2.g.(1) Work telephone number.
- (2) Home telephone number.
- 2.h. E-mail address.
- 2.i. Marital status. X first box if single, second box if married, third box if separated, fourth box if divorced, or fifth box if widowed.
- 3. Ward. a. Name (last, first, middle initial).
- c. Date of birth. Four digit year, two digit month, two digit day.
- d. Complete address: Street, apartment number, city, state, zip code.
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.
Forms referenced inside this one are located by number alone, and that simplicity is a direct product of Department-level numbering. Because the DD sequence is maintained centrally and not duplicated by service, a number is a complete address: one number, one document, throughout the Defense establishment.
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.
A form is downstream of the policy that requires it, and revision usually starts there: a directive is reissued, a collection requirement is altered, notice language is updated by statute. The form is republished as a consequence. Since none of that reaches individual users, an archived copy quietly becomes wrong, and verifying not stated each time you download is the whole remedy.
A word on what this page is. It distributes a published Department of Defense document and describes what the document contains and how it is completed. It is not the issuing authority, does not speak for one, and offers no legal advice; nothing written here determines whether a particular submission will be accepted, because that determination belongs entirely to the office receiving it. Questions of applicability, eligibility or procedure go to not stated, to your servicing personnel office, or to the office identified in not stated.
Questions and answers
- What is DD Form 137-7?
- DD Form 137-7, Dependency Statement - Ward of a Court
- Which edition is current?
- Not stated by the publisher
- Who is responsible for this form?
- Not stated
- In which formats can it be downloaded?