Ancestry.com puts 90M war records online
Just put online yesterday, Free access until June 6
By DONNA BORAK
AP BUSINESS WRITER
photo
This Nov. 1943 black-and-white photo provided by Ancestry.com from the National Archives, shows pilots grinning across the tail of an F6F Hellcat on board the USS Lexington, after shooting down 17 out of 20 Japanese plans heading for Tarawa. (AP Photo/Ancestry.com from the National Archives)
WASHINGTON -- For every generation in this country there has been a war. And with wars come millions of records that can shed light on family history, detailing everything from the color of soldiers' eyes to what their neighbors may have said about them.
On Thursday, Ancestry.com unveils more than 90 million U.S. war records from the first English settlement at Jamestown in 1607 through the Vietnam War's end in 1975. The site also has the names of 3.5 million U.S. soldiers killed in action, including 2,000 who died in Iraq.
"The history of our families is intertwined with the history of our country," Tim Sullivan, chief executive of Ancestry.com, said in a telephone interview. "Almost every family has a family member or a loved one that has served their country in the military."
The records, which can be accessed free until the anniversary of D-Day on June 6, came from the National Archives and Records Administration and include 37 million images, draft registration cards from both world wars, military yearbooks, prisoner-of-war records from four wars, unit rosters from the Marine Corps from 1893 through 1958, and Civil War pension records, among others.
The popularity of genealogy in the U.S. has increased steadily alongside the Internet's growth. Specialized search engines on sites like Ancestry.com, Genealogy.com and FamilySearch.com, along with general search portals like Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc., have helped fuel interest.
"The Internet has created this massive democratization in the whole family history world," said Megan Smolenyak, chief family historian for Ancestry.com. "It's like a global game of tag."
Ancestry.com, which is owned by Generations Network, spent $3 million to digitize the military records. It took nearly a year, including some 1,500 handwriting specialists racking up 270,000 hours to review the oldest records.
The 10-year-old Provo, Utah-based company doesn't have every U.S. military record. Over the past four centuries, some have been lost or destroyed. Some records remain classified.
However, this is the first time a for-profit Web site is featuring this many military records as part of a $100 million investment in what Sullivan says is the largest genealogy Web site with 900,000 paying subscribers. He joined Ancestry.com 18 months ago after leaving the CEO post at online dating giant Match.com.
After June 6, users can pay $155.40 a year for unlimited access to thousands of U.S. record databases, Sullivan said.
Budget constraints and a long list of unfinished priorities have limited federal efforts to make roughly 9 billion public documents available online, said National Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper.
"In a perfect world, we would do all this ourselves and it would up there for free," she said. "While we continue to work to make our materials accessible as widely as possible, we can't do everything."
Subscribers can set up their own family tree pages on the Ancestry.com site and combine personal information with public records from the site. If they want to restrict access to their pages, privacy controls are available. And information posted about people who were born after 1922, or people born earlier but who are still alive, is automatically blocked from public view.
As for public records that contain what family members might not want the rest of the world to see, there's little recourse involving records on the deceased. Privacy laws don't cover public records of the dead.
Most novice genealogists, however, seem to be more interested in finding out whether they're related to battlefield heroes than they are worried about embarrassing revelations.
Loren Whitney, 30, a software engineer at the company since 2002, has been tracking his family's military history for seven years and discovered a relative going back seven generations from the newest records.
Whitney, an Arkansas native, learned that his mother's third-great-grandfather Thomas Bingham served in the Mormon Battalion to help the U.S. Army in the Mexican War around 1846. That discovery led to Bingham's great-grandfather, Capt. David Perry, who had published chronicles of the French and Indian War in 1819.
"It's exhilarating to find these connections and to see how other people's lives have connected with yours in the way they put you in the situation and circumstances that you are in," Whitney said.
Professional historian Curt Witcher recommends that people have fun and maintain realistic expectations when it comes to genealogy.
A small percentage of amateurs "have this hope, this aspiration, this belief, they've arrived at Mecca and in a few minutes we'll bring the golden tablets out," Witcher said. Most of the time they find out relatives weren't historical celebrities.
Professional researchers, like Witcher, though praise Ancestry.com and other sites that have put vast collections of public data online.
"Bureaucracies generate paper and for researchers that is golden," said Witcher, manager of the historical genealogy department at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Ind. He oversees the second-largest genealogical library in the world, and his library helps more than 82,000 people a year authenticate family trees.
As fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan continues, there seems to be a natural draw to tales of military ancestry, a desire to preserve history.
William Endicott, an 81-year-old veteran who served in the 33rd Infantry division of Illinois in World War II, researched his family tree for two decades and found out that his great-grandparents traveled across the Oregon Trail during the 1870s to settle in Eastern Oregon.
Endicott said he tells his veteran buddies all the time: "Our memories are dimming at the ages that we are. Get your history down."
(This version CORRECTS name of Ancestry.com's parent company to Generations Network.) )
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By DONNA BORAK
AP BUSINESS WRITER
photo
This Nov. 1943 black-and-white photo provided by Ancestry.com from the National Archives, shows pilots grinning across the tail of an F6F Hellcat on board the USS Lexington, after shooting down 17 out of 20 Japanese plans heading for Tarawa. (AP Photo/Ancestry.com from the National Archives)
WASHINGTON -- For every generation in this country there has been a war. And with wars come millions of records that can shed light on family history, detailing everything from the color of soldiers' eyes to what their neighbors may have said about them.
On Thursday, Ancestry.com unveils more than 90 million U.S. war records from the first English settlement at Jamestown in 1607 through the Vietnam War's end in 1975. The site also has the names of 3.5 million U.S. soldiers killed in action, including 2,000 who died in Iraq.
"The history of our families is intertwined with the history of our country," Tim Sullivan, chief executive of Ancestry.com, said in a telephone interview. "Almost every family has a family member or a loved one that has served their country in the military."
The records, which can be accessed free until the anniversary of D-Day on June 6, came from the National Archives and Records Administration and include 37 million images, draft registration cards from both world wars, military yearbooks, prisoner-of-war records from four wars, unit rosters from the Marine Corps from 1893 through 1958, and Civil War pension records, among others.
The popularity of genealogy in the U.S. has increased steadily alongside the Internet's growth. Specialized search engines on sites like Ancestry.com, Genealogy.com and FamilySearch.com, along with general search portals like Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc., have helped fuel interest.
"The Internet has created this massive democratization in the whole family history world," said Megan Smolenyak, chief family historian for Ancestry.com. "It's like a global game of tag."
Ancestry.com, which is owned by Generations Network, spent $3 million to digitize the military records. It took nearly a year, including some 1,500 handwriting specialists racking up 270,000 hours to review the oldest records.
The 10-year-old Provo, Utah-based company doesn't have every U.S. military record. Over the past four centuries, some have been lost or destroyed. Some records remain classified.
However, this is the first time a for-profit Web site is featuring this many military records as part of a $100 million investment in what Sullivan says is the largest genealogy Web site with 900,000 paying subscribers. He joined Ancestry.com 18 months ago after leaving the CEO post at online dating giant Match.com.
After June 6, users can pay $155.40 a year for unlimited access to thousands of U.S. record databases, Sullivan said.
Budget constraints and a long list of unfinished priorities have limited federal efforts to make roughly 9 billion public documents available online, said National Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper.
"In a perfect world, we would do all this ourselves and it would up there for free," she said. "While we continue to work to make our materials accessible as widely as possible, we can't do everything."
Subscribers can set up their own family tree pages on the Ancestry.com site and combine personal information with public records from the site. If they want to restrict access to their pages, privacy controls are available. And information posted about people who were born after 1922, or people born earlier but who are still alive, is automatically blocked from public view.
As for public records that contain what family members might not want the rest of the world to see, there's little recourse involving records on the deceased. Privacy laws don't cover public records of the dead.
Most novice genealogists, however, seem to be more interested in finding out whether they're related to battlefield heroes than they are worried about embarrassing revelations.
Loren Whitney, 30, a software engineer at the company since 2002, has been tracking his family's military history for seven years and discovered a relative going back seven generations from the newest records.
Whitney, an Arkansas native, learned that his mother's third-great-grandfather Thomas Bingham served in the Mormon Battalion to help the U.S. Army in the Mexican War around 1846. That discovery led to Bingham's great-grandfather, Capt. David Perry, who had published chronicles of the French and Indian War in 1819.
"It's exhilarating to find these connections and to see how other people's lives have connected with yours in the way they put you in the situation and circumstances that you are in," Whitney said.
Professional historian Curt Witcher recommends that people have fun and maintain realistic expectations when it comes to genealogy.
A small percentage of amateurs "have this hope, this aspiration, this belief, they've arrived at Mecca and in a few minutes we'll bring the golden tablets out," Witcher said. Most of the time they find out relatives weren't historical celebrities.
Professional researchers, like Witcher, though praise Ancestry.com and other sites that have put vast collections of public data online.
"Bureaucracies generate paper and for researchers that is golden," said Witcher, manager of the historical genealogy department at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Ind. He oversees the second-largest genealogical library in the world, and his library helps more than 82,000 people a year authenticate family trees.
As fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan continues, there seems to be a natural draw to tales of military ancestry, a desire to preserve history.
William Endicott, an 81-year-old veteran who served in the 33rd Infantry division of Illinois in World War II, researched his family tree for two decades and found out that his great-grandparents traveled across the Oregon Trail during the 1870s to settle in Eastern Oregon.
Endicott said he tells his veteran buddies all the time: "Our memories are dimming at the ages that we are. Get your history down."
(This version CORRECTS name of Ancestry.com's parent company to Generations Network.) )
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btt 0 -
In my case these records are pretty lame. I tried to look up my uncle, who was killed in the Phillippines in WW2, and who I am named after. They had nothing except the location of his grave, which I already knew.
Uncle Buddy's death is a mystery, because family lore is that he was killed in the third wave of the invasion of Luzon, which was Dec 18 1944. I was always told he was shot in the head by a Jap sniper.
However, the limited records I have gotten previously, show that he died in a hospital in the Phillippines on Feb 2 1945. So, evidently he was wounded on the beach and died several months later.
Even this little info about Uncle Buddy's death in the hospital was not available on ancestry.com
So their info was free, and it was worthless.
Then I looked up my dad, who served in the Army Air Corps in WW2. They had nothing on my dad.
Back in the seventies there was a big fire at the veterans records place in St. Louis and it destroyed many of the records, I guess, including those of my dad and uncle.
What does btt mean?0 -
quote:Originally posted by allen griggs
In my case these records are pretty lame. I tried to look up my uncle, who was killed in the Phillippines in WW2, and who I am named after. They had nothing except the location of his grave, which I already knew.
Uncle Buddy's death is a mystery, because family lore is that he was killed in the third wave of the invasion of Luzon, which was Dec 18 1944. I was always told he was shot in the head by a Jap sniper.
However, the limited records I have gotten previously, show that he died in a hospital in the Phillippines on Feb 2 1945. So, evidently he was wounded on the beach and died several months later.
Even this little info about Uncle Buddy's death in the hospital was not available on ancestry.com
So their info was free, and it was worthless.
Then I looked up my dad, who served in the Army Air Corps in WW2. They had nothing on my dad.
Back in the seventies there was a big fire at the veterans records place in St. Louis and it destroyed many of the records, I guess, including those of my dad and uncle.
What does btt mean?
Back to top!
And that site only gives you a tease untill you pay for the service, not unlike most other sites!0 -
I'm trying to find more info about one of my ancestors; Adam. He was a really good gardener, supoosedly he could talk directly to God too. sounds pretty cool. So far I only found references to him in the Bible. Anyone else related to this guy? 0 -
quote:And that site only gives you a tease untill you pay for the service, not unlike most other sites!
Normally this is right. But the records that allen posted about are ALL free unti June 6. They just don't have much detail. I have my grandfathers enlistment papers and discharge papers from WW2. Pulled him up, and they have most of it right. They show him entering the service in Oct. 42 at Camp Forest in TN, but instead of listing his occupation as "farmer", as in on the original papers, they list him as a "geographer." Just a bit of difference there! Pulled my great-granddad up from WW1 and they had about the same thing. They did list where he had been wounded in France, but I have the original typed paper from his commanding officer on that verifying the awarding of his "wound badge."
Ancestory.com, even if a pay service, is a great site. They do have LOTS of good stuff on-line. Somebody has to pay their bills. You can either pay them or spend hours and hours and hours digging the stuff up yourself. And it ain't cheap to do that yourself if you have to travel to get to the records.0 -
"And that site only gives you a tease untill you pay for the service, not unlike most other sites!"
gitrdone: They have free access to all the military records through June6, at least that is what they claim. It is a two week advertising gimmick.0 -
..I looked up two uncles yesterday. One was killed in 1944 and the other retired in the '80s as a full colonel, with a silver star. All they had was their dates and places of enlistment. Instead of "farmer" the younger one is listed as "actor/director". Got a good laugh out of that. The site couldn't even locate their graves, though they're both buried less than five miles from me.
..My brother in law who did a tour in 'Nam?.....nothing.
..A guy I knew as a kid who was KIA in 'Nam?....nothing. (he is listed on The Wall website)0 -
just went to the site , info on my late dad 50% incorrect , and only had enlistment info nothing else, this free service is virtually useless without more info,they must be waiting till you have to join/pay to get any real info. 0 -
Ahem. A word about "records". Was having problems with some of MY military records- while I was still on active duty. Paperwork, efficency reports, updated clearances- all seem to drop into the black hole orbiting somehwere out there. Finally went to my commanding general for help. He assigned an inspector general to straighten out the mess. 3 weeks later, the IG told me they found the problem- in my records, I was listed as "Killed in Action" in 1971. And no, this is NOT a joke. Yeah, I DID check the Wall to see if I was there (I am not). 0 -
That site is about as lame as they come and has always been that way.
I did find some very interesting news however.
I was buried in Montana in 1950, twelve years before I was born!!
And served in the 3rd infantry div during WW2.
Something about that site always gave the creeps.
It keeps asking for you to provide them more and more information about yourself until they know when you last changed your drawers.0 -
I heard a report on the radio this morning, that ancestry.com had spent two million dollars over the past year to dig up all the war records, and to put them online. Then, they would give people two free weeks.
This gave me some hope that I could get the scoop on my uncle.
I must say, ancestry.com is pretty lame, when I can get more info by sending a single letter to that veterans place in Virginia, than they can get with two million dollars, a team of researchers, and a year's time.
And my dad, fought in WW2 for two years, and they say he doesn't exist?
That must mean that I don't exist, either.
It has all been a dream for these 56 years. Pretty vivid dream.0
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