Today, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Ancestry.com announce the launch of the World Memory Project. The goal is to build the largest free online resource for information about victims and survivors of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution during World War II.

The Museum’s archives contain information on well over 17 million people targeted by Nazi racial and political policies, including Jews, Poles, Roma, Ukrainians, political prisoners, and many others. The Museum assists thousands of people worldwide every year that are searching for information about individuals in its collections. The World Memory Project will greatly expand the accessibility of the Museum’s archival collection and enable millions of people to search for their own answers online.

“The Nazis’ genocidal policies quickly turned millions of individual lives, filled with hopes and dreams, into massive statistics that are hard to comprehend. Through our partnership with Ancestry.com, we hope to remind the public that the Holocaust is not about numbers but about individuals just like us and to help families uncover histories they thought were lost,” says Sara J. Bloomfield, Director, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The Museum’s vast archives contain documentation that may be the only remaining link to an individual life. Preserving these personal histories and making them available online is one of the most powerful ways we can learn from history and honor the victims.”

Despite the Nazis’ efforts to erase human history, millions of their victims’ experiences were recorded in documents that still exist today. The World Memory Project enables anyone to help bring the information from these documents online – one record and a few minutes at a time – to help families discover the fate of lost loved ones and forge new connections that transcend war and time.

That is where you come in. The World Memory Project is a component of the Ancestry World Archives Project (AWAP), which we started a little over three years ago to help preserve records for generations, plus make them free and accessible online. It’s easy to get involved – anyone with a keyboard, a little time and an interest in helping preserve history can input information from the documents for the World Memory Project. And the indexes you help create will be available, searchable and online, free, to anyone at any time. You’ll find details about contributing as well as simple instructions for “keying” the records at http://worldmemoryproject.org.

Even a few minutes of your time can help families discover what happened to their loved ones and restore the identities of people the Nazis tried to erase from history. The power of truth is in your hands.

For example, these photos of my grandpa Jerry Ogden (who died when I was too young to have any memory of him) are priceless to me.
 
Our ancestors were living, breathing people. And they left behind visual cues to their lives, like photographs, documents and stories. When you add these details to your tree family, the history you share is more exciting and complete, and it’s a great way to get kids or grandkids interested in learning more.

Sometimes scanning in all those pictures can feel like an overwhelming project, but it can go pretty quickly with a digital camera.  A few months ago while visiting my grandma, I grabbed my camera and quickly photographed a bunch of papers and artifacts from grandpa’s world war II days.
 
It took less than an hour to preserve the whole shoebox.  So go dig out those old boxes of photos and documents and put them somewhere everyone can appreciate them — in your Ancestry.com family tree.

Your family tree can be either public or private, so you can share those family photos and memories with just your relatives, or you can also let everyone enjoy Grandpa’s incredible handlebar mustache.
 

We’ve recently made lots of improvements to make uploading all kinds of media a snap.

It just takes a few simple steps:
 
1.  Click on an ancestor in your family tree.
2.  Click the “upload photos” link in the media gallery.
3.  Select the images you want to add from your computer.
4.  That’s it.

We’ve enhanced six new U.S. Census collections – in addition to the six we released a few months ago.  In all, we’ve gone through over 200 million records to greatly improve images and many indexes.

Enhanced and clearer images are now available for the 1790-1900 censuses and indexes have been improved for the 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1900 censuses. If you have had a hard time finding your ancestors in these censuses, it’s time to search again.

It’s amazing that these wonderful records that chronicle American families for the past 200 years are now available to us in the comfort of our homes. The journey that the U.S. census took from the hands of the census taker who knocked on your ancestor’s door, to the screen of your home computer is a long one. Understanding that route can help you when it comes to interpreting your finds and weighing any conflicting details the census reveals.

You’ll notice all of the images have a cleaner, crisper look. And occasionally you’ll find you can read names that were illegible before—either because they were too light, too dark, too blurry, covered in tape, or even in some cases missing, etc.

So if you found a record before that you couldn’t quite decipher (“Is that really my ancestor’s name? What is his occupation? I can’t quite make it out. . . .”) you’ll want to look again. The images will be updated on your family trees as well, so if you saved the record there, you can just revisit it on your tree.

This past week, I along with Quinton Atkinson and Brian Peterson, some of the Content group colleagues, attended a conference of the National Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators (NAGARA), of which the Council of State Archivists (CoSA) is a subset. Most all of the states were represented there by their State Archivist and some of their staff. It was a great opportunity to get together with them and understand their needs and how Ancestry.com can work with them. We were specifically focused on how we can collaborate on digitization efforts.

Currently Ancestry.com has either signed or has pending agreements with close to 20 U.S. State Archives. The agreements cover various types of records including vital, military, naturalization, court and land records and address mutually beneficial priorities.

At the conference, Ancestry.com personnel participated in several sessions. We joined FamilySearch for a grant writing reality type presentation. Both parties offered grants to NAGARA members for digitization services. The applicant finalists made presentations and then a peer review committee (like American Idol judges) gave critiques of the grant proposals. Finally, two winners were announced and we explained why we selected their proposals. Ancestry.com will assist FamilySearch in the digitization of Summit County, OH Vital Records.

Ancestry.com also announced that we would be awarding $1.5 million in digitization services grants through State Archives in the first quarter of 2009. We handed out Grant Packets to nearly 70 interested parties and there was palpable excitement over the announcement.

Many of the sessions emphasized how Ancestry.com and FamilySearch are working on a cooperative basis on joint digitization projects. The conference was the platform for announcing the Enhanced U.S. Census Project: http://tgn.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=123

Another prominent topic at the conference was the “Preserving the American Historical Record” (PAHR) bill, which was sponsored by CoSA and introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives on May 14, 2008, as H.R. 6056. You can follow the progress of this bill at http://www.archivists.org/pahr/. The State Archivists have tried for many years to get funding from the federal level to preserve and create access to historic records. This is the farthest they’ve ever gotten. Ancestry.com has been very supportive of this effort and participated in the PAHR presentation. The above link has a place where you can go to contact your representative to help get this important genealogical legislation past.

Our attendance at the NAGARA/CoSA conference emphasizes Ancestry.com’s strategy to work closely with state and local governments to digitize significant amounts of their content and to do so collaboratively. I would be glad to hear from any of the Blog’s readers about how you would like us to work with the archivist community.