The records give those of us curious about Amelia’s past a first-hand view of the investigation into the claim that she and her navigator Fred Noonan were taken prisoner and executed in Saipan, which at the time was governed by Japan. Through the years, this adaptation of Earhart’s death has become one of the many theories surrounding the 39-year-old’s mystery-riddled disappearance.

In the above letter, Congressman J. Arthur Younger requests an investigation be made into evidence from U.S. Army Sergeant Thomas Devine, who said he had seen Amelia Earhart’s grave while he was stationed in Saipan.

In the telegram below, U.S. Ambassador to Japan Douglas MacArthur II explains that Japan has identified eight people who may have knowledge about Amelia Earhart’s disappearance in Saipan.

The Earhart file is part of the Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad collection on Ancestry.com.

Explore more details of the investigation here, and decide for yourself what really happened to Amelia Earhart. And if you’re still curious, go check out the movie “Amelia” coming out tonight. After learning more about the life of this amazing aviatrix, that’s exactly what I plan to do.

Provided by the National Archives at Atlanta, the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary Collection (1902-1921) spans two decades and consists of more than 14,000 inmate records documenting some of the worst criminals in U.S. history.

Some of the most common offenses perpetrated by Atlanta Federal Penitentiary inmates, and documented in this new collection, include illegal distilling, tax evasion, counterfeiting, mail fraud and mail theft.

The collection also contains records documenting some more curious kinds of crimes, including:

• Butter Imposter – Several individuals in the collection were sentenced to federal prison because they violated the “Oleo Margarine Act,” which made it a crime to produce margarine that looked too much like butter. Beginning in 1916, John R. Seymour spent 19 months behind bars for violating the Oleo Margarine Act.
• Bad Seed – One individual, David A. Keys, spent more than three years in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary because of “scandalous conduct tending to the destruction of good morals.”
• Lead Foot – In 1915, Charles Arnett was sent to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary to serve 19 months of jail time for “joy riding” in Washington, DC.
• Youngest Prisoner – In 1905, twelve-year-old Preston James was sentenced in Jacksonville, Fla., for embezzlement of U.S. mail, and went on to serve a 2-year prison term.

The first residents of the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary arrived in 1902. Because only three federal penitentiaries existed at that time, each served a large region of the country. Criminals tried in Eastern and Southeastern states including New York, Washington, DC, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Florida were often sent to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary to carry out their sentences.

Check out the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary Collection to see if there’s a notorious character in your family tree.

In the October newsletter we featured a new collection of London parish registers (containing baptism, marriage, and burial records from various churches, or parishes) extending all the way back to the 1500s. Besides providing an interesting look at London’s social history, these records are an absolutely phenomenal resource for family history–since government records weren’t started until 1837. In many cases, these are the only source of vital records available before that time.  

To read the rest of the article from the Ancestry Monthly Update, click here.

If you’re not already a subscriber to the monthly newsletter, you can become one by clicking the “My Account” link in the upper, right-hand side of your Ancestry.com homepage; then clicking “Update your email preferences” (again, on the right); and then making sure the checkbox next to Ancestry Monthly Update is selected.

Since the signing of an agreement in May 2008, we have worked with NARA to digitize historical records collections on-location at NARA’s archive in Maryland. This is the first time NARA has partnered with a commercial entity to have documents scanned off-site. The new scanning facility will allow us to digitize more than five times the records than it could at the NARA archive, with the capacity to scan at least 5 million documents, many still in paper form, each year.

To celebrate this growing relationship with NARA, we have launched two collections that were a part of the May 2008 partnership announcement:

Honolulu Passenger List, 1900-1953
Honolulu Passenger Lists, 1900-1953, consists of more than 1.4 million records of passenger arrivals to Honolulu, Hawaii.  Included in this collection are some familiar names who visited the island of Oahu from 1900 to 1953:

• Rita Hayworth – For the filming of Miss Sadie Thompson, Rita traveled to Hawaii aboard the ship Lurline and arrived in Honolulu on May 23, 1953.
• Shirley Temple – In 1935, at the age of six, Shirley Temple traveled to Hawaii with her parents, Gertrude and George, for the filming of Curly Top. She returned to Hawaii in 1937 and 1939.
• Cary Grant (Archibald Leach) – Traveling with Mary Astor (Lucille) and her husband, Manuel Del Campo, aboard the Mastonia, in 1938.
• John Wayne – Arrived in Honolulu with wife, Esperanza, aboard the ship Lurline on March 19, 1952 for the filming of Big Jim McLain.

Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad, 1963-1974
We also launched Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad, 1963-1974. This first installment of more than 80,000 records consists of letters, formal reports, passports and other key historical documents that verify deaths of Americans overseas. Included in this valuable collection are some familiar names:

• Judy Garland – Listed as “Judy Garland DeVinko”, Garland died of “barbiturate poisoning, incautious overdose, accidental” in her Chelsea, London, house in 1969.
• Sylvia Plath – The death record states that American author “Sylvia Plath-Hughes” died of “Carbon Monoxide Poisoning (domestic gas) whilst suffering from depression. Did kill herself” in February 1963 in London. She is buried in Yorkshire, England.
• Mama Cass – Listed as “Ellen Naomi Cohen”, Mama Cass, from The Mamas and the Papas, died of “fatty myocardial degeneration due to obesity,” contrary to rumors she choked on a ham sandwich, while in London in 1974.
• Jimi Hendrix – In 1970, controversy surrounded Jimi Hendrix’s London death, as there was no solid confirmation of his cause of death. This record collection continues to add to the mystery: James Marshall Hendrix’s death record was replaced with a note showing that J. White checked out the death record in 1979. Today, the check-out slip is the only document in Jimi Hendrix’s file.

]]> http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2009/10/06/ancestry-com-announces-new-washington-dc-scanning-facility/feed/ 22 http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2009/09/18/drouin-update/ http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2009/09/18/drouin-update/#comments Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:47:23 +0000 Chad Milliner http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/?p=2096 We are pleased to have resolved all issues relating to our use and access to the Drouin Collection. The existing Drouin collection will be available on Ancestry.com (and other Ancestry international properties) on Monday, September 21.

In anticipation of this anniversary, Ancestry.com has digitized and indexed three new collections of New York records:

• Mortality schedules for 1850, 1860, 1870 and 1880: These mortality schedules are an important addition to our extensive repository of census records. The same enumerators who took the population census also compiled non-population schedules focused on mortality, agriculture, industry and manufacturing, and social statistics. As a first installment, we’ve just released a complete set of New York mortality schedules for 1850, 1870 and 1880 and a partial set of schedules for 1860 (we’re still working on the counties near the end of the alphabet: New York through Yates).

• Naturalization indexes for the years 1906-1966: These records were indexed by members of the community through the Ancestry.com World Archives Project. Like all indexes created by the project’s contributors, the naturalization indexes will always be available to the public for free.

• City directories for Albany, Buffalo, New York City, Niagara Falls, Rochester, Watertown and White Plains: Most of these directories are from the 20th century, but some of the New York City directories go back as far as 1833.

The New York 400th Anniversary page provides easy access to the Web’s largest repository of New York-based records, including passenger lists from the peak immigration years of 1820-1957, vital records from the Dutch, English and American periods, and dozens of other collections.

I hope you’ll join us in celebrating New York’s history by visiting our 400th Anniversary page and exploring your own connections to the state. If you have a success story relating to your New York research, please share it by posting a comment on this blog.

United States Obituary Collection – This database continues to grow weekly.  Plus, beginning this year, it now contains more extracted fields, and in some cases, photographs.

Jewish Collection – Several new databases were added, including content from AJHS, JewishGen and Miriam Weiner.

AJHS Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum Records, 1878-1969

Passenger and Immigration Lists Index, 1500s-1900s – Over 100,000 records were added to the database.

Selected U.S. Naturalization Records – Original Documents, 1790-1974 (World Archives Project) – 15 new states were added to this important collection of original documents, including Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon, California, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Mississippi, South Carolina, Florida, Montana, Tennessee, Georgia, New York, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Washington.

Original Declaration of Intention Document from Colorado

1810 United States Federal Census & 1820 United States Federal Census – The new, higher quality images provided in cooperation with FamilySearch were added.  Be sure to take a look.

U.S. City Directories – Since May, we’ve added over 4,200 new city directories to this huge collection, ranging from the years 1820-1949.  Over 1,000 more from later years are coming within the next 30 days.

Virgin Islands Slave Records – For the first time ever, these priceless records have been published online.  More collections are in the works.

U.S. School Yearbooks – The largest online school yearbook collection grew by 2,000 with the most recent update.

NARA Collections on Ancestry.com – This new catalog was added to give users the ability to search by keyword, title, and series number to see if a NARA collection is available on Ancestry.com.  To see the full list of NARA titles available to subscribers, click here.

Historical Newspaper Collection – Newspapers from over 80 new U.S. cities and towns were added.

U.S. World War II Draft Registration Cards, 1942 – Draft cards from the state of Illinois were added.

WWII Draft Card from Illinois

See all recent U.S. Content releases

Please let me know if you have any questions about the collections above or on U.S. Content in general.

These St. Croix African Roots Project records will help tens of thousands of people trace their ancestral roots, some to individual Africans and specific African homelands.

The first installment of this collection that went online today includes the U.S. Virgin Islands St. Croix Slave Lists (1772-1821) and Population Census (1835-1911), which together contain information on more than 700,000 slaves, owners and family members.

These records will be searchable for free on Ancestry.com until the end of July.

A Powerful Family Discovery:
For Susan Samuel of Houston, TX, the documents uncover the story of her great-great-great-great-grandmother Venus Johannes. Records soon to be online show that, while still young, Venus Johannes was captured from the side of a river in Senegal, Africa and enslaved at Goree Island – a stop for captured slaves as they were loaded onto ships bound for Britain and the U.S. Other records show that from Goree Island, she was married off to an American Sea Captain and brought to St. Croix, where she was illegally re-enslaved. Enslaved for some 30 years, she was finally freed in 1815.

Ancestry.com has set up a remote scanning operation in St. Croix to digitize more of this collection and in the coming year, the site will add more than a million family history records from the project including:

• Slave Trade Shipping Records 1749-1802 – Names and prices of enslaved Africans sold from slave ships to purchasers on St. Croix
• Property Inventories 1755-1848 - Names, occupations, property values, locations and family relations of enslaved individuals
• Free Persons of Color Records 1740-1834 – Periodic censuses, lists and freedom charters for the free colored population and other special censuses and papers
• Church Records 1744-1917 – Records of baptisms, marriages, births and deaths of slaves and free persons belonging to the Lutheran, Dutch Reform, Anglican, Roman Catholic and Moravian churches in St. Croix
• Vital Statistics 1820-1917 – Records of births, death, and marriages on an annual basis with information about family relations
• Vaccination Records 1823-1853 – Smallpox vaccination records for all plantation slaves for the years 1823-1824 and annual vaccinations performed in both towns and plantations 1829-1853
• Emancipation Records 1848 – Compiled for all plantation slaves freed in order to establish compensation amounts for the owners
• Movements of Plantation Workers 1848-1870 – Traces the movements of ex-slaves around St. Croix and off-island in the years after emancipation
• Immigration Records 1850-1917 – Documents immigration of people from other Caribbean Islands to St. Croix after emancipation
• Laborer Lists 1849-1917 – Lists of laborers working on the plantations

Search the two new St. Croix databases at http://www.ancestry.com/virginislands.

Defining and counting records on Ancestry.com

The concept of ‘counting’ records sounds relatively simple until you get deep into the details. How is a record defined? Is it a mention of a person? A household? A page? If a birth record has the person, parents, doctor and witness, how many records is that? And what of records where we don’t know for certain how many people are referenced, such as newspapers or city directories?

For our ‘fielded’ or indexed collections – structured data such as censuses and passenger lists – a record count is defined as the information about each specific person included. For example, one WWI Draft Registration Card is counted as one record. Similarly, each line on a census page is also counted as one record as typically it to will contain information about a specific individual.

For our ‘unfielded‘ collections such as newspapers and family histories, there is no underlying structure to define a field and so until now pages have been sampled then an average applied to determine an estimated name count. For example, our 42.5 million (countable) newspaper pages were multiplied by 60 names per page to achieve an estimated total name count.

Traditionally, we have counted our total number of records by combining the number of records for each person contained in our fielded collections and the estimated number of names in our unfielded collections.

However, as our company and collections have grown so significantly in recent years, we have decided to apply a new and highly conservative counting methodology that better reflects our differing data structures. Going forward, all unfielded pages will now be counted as one record – no name estimates will be included in our total record counts.

So what does this mean?

Based on this new methodology we have over 4 billion records. Previously, we referred to an estimated 8 billion names listed with in our record collections. This is a change to our counting methodology only – no records have been removed. Ancestry.com members will continue to have access to all the great records they had previously.

With new records launching every week, these numbers are always increasing. More importantly, no matter how we count them, our goal is to continue to bring millions of valuable records to our members like we’ve been doing for more than a decade.

For those of us that have some Canadian roots this is a great day. I have already found many records about my ancestors in these collections.  The complete collection is useful for helping to track an ancestor’s life and understanding the family. We have had the complete national census collections for the US and the UK for years now but this is the first time we have it for Canada. We were able to partner with the Library and Archives in Canada and with FamilySearch to make this happen in a very aggressive timeframe from the public release of these records by the Canadian government.

We hope you find a lot of success in this collection and we would love to hear from you about it.