Not just anyone could sign up. This was a RELIEF PROGRAM (which I sure wish was still going on today) that existed from 1933 to 1942 in the US. It was part of President Roosevelt's "New Deal" and a man had to be 18-23 years old (eventually they took men 17-28 years old) who were unmarried an unemployed.
image from PBS
A ROBERT STONE FILM
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CCC LEGAGY. ORG - RESEARCH includes links to forms to send away to the right National Archives (Saint Louis) and information on CAMP LISTS.
So OK, the difficult has been (hopefully in the past) that men who joined the CCC's were sent to various camps, not necessarily close to home. The goal was to SEND MONEY HOME and LEARN SKILLS. The 1940 census might be of help to some of you, but don't count on it. I've personally been unable to use a database to search that census for CCC members I'm looking for. One of the reasons is that a typical participant stayed in the program for 6 months and could reenlist a total of 4 times for a 2 year stint. This wasn't a branch of the military, but there was a sort of boot camp at first to see if a person was physically fit before they started doing a lot of hard physical labor, like building walls or planting trees to reforest a burned out area. A person could be transferred around to where there were work projects. Many men from poor families dropped out of high school to join or first did the CCC's and then enlisted in the military. There were separate camps for veterans and Native Americans.
Today when you go to many parks, you will find stone walls and stairways that are still in use that CCC workers built. (Such is the case in some of the Santa Monica Mountains here in Southern California.)
