2. The First Social Security Card

John David Sweeney, Jr., of Westchester County, New York, was the person who was issued Social Security Number 055-09-0001 in November 1936. When the Social Security Board first started their plan to issue numbers, they worked in conjunction with the Postal Service. SS-5 forms were sent out to employers across the country for their employees to fill out. The completed forms were either mailed or returned to the local post office in person, and then a Social Security Number would be assigned and a card typed up. The first 1,000 cards were mailed out simultaneously, so there is no way to accurately determine who actually physically received the first Social Security Card. The records for those 1,000 cards were sent to the main processing center in Baltimore, where they began the process of becoming a permanent file in which the number holder’s earnings could be recorded. The head of the Division of Accounting Operations pulled the top form off of the pile (which was John Sweeney’s) and declared it to be the official first Social Security Record. Sweeney died at the age of 61 and never collected any Social Security benefits, but his widow did until she passed away in 1982.