Ancestry yesterday announced at the RootsTech conference in Salt Lake City, Utah the completion of a major digitization project.
WWII draft cards
In time to mark the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, Ancestry has completed a multi-year project, in partnership with the US National Archives & Records Administration and FamilySearch volunteers, to digitize 36 million of the country’s available WWII young men’s draft cards.
Calling the collection “game-changing content, Ancestry said, “A single card can be a very helpful starting point for new users beginning to build a family tree and can lead to more impactful discoveries due to the rich and unique details they often include, such as physical description, eye colour, employer, next of kin, and even why someone was exempt from the draft.”
Todd Godfrey, vice-president for Global Content at Ancestry, said, “These records add to the largest collection of US military records for family history research.”
Other new records
Ancestry also announced it has released New York City Certificate Indexes for birth, marriage, and death records, representing more than 14 million records from 1862-1949.
There are nine state-wide digitization projects and Ancestry is unveiling new naturalization records from six US states.
This year, more than over 100 million new records will be added from national collections in Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Mexico, and Norway, including more than six million Mexico Catholic records and over 50 million France census and birth, marriage and death records.
Ancestry is also actively digitizing and publishing census and birth, marriage and death records in over a dozen countries, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom.
The company announced it is increasing its investment in new collections to over $20 million in 2020. During the past 20 years, the company has invested more than $300 million.
