World Memory Project Update


It’s a big week for the World Memory Project and the for the Ancestry World Archives Project community.  We published three new projects to key.  We released a new project to search.  And, we are getting ready for a busy week at the IAJGS conference in Washington D.C.  Keep reading for all of the latest news on each of these topics.

Published To Key

Yesterday we published three new World Memory Project collections.  You can read a little bit about each collection below.  Then click on the links to go to the project pages where you can get all the information you will need to start keying on each of these collections.

USHMM – Czech Republic, Social Welfare and Repatriation Records of Holocaust Survivors, 1939-1948

This collection contains records on persecution and emigration during the German occupation; name lists; registration cards; correspondence; information about Czechoslovakian organizations in the United States; United Nations reports on Nazi crimes; descriptions of camps; information on repatriations from France; information on emigration to Chile, Cuba, Paraguay, Venezuela, Trinidad, and the USSR; documents of the Czechoslovakian branch of the Red Cross; and reports on displaced persons camps.

USHMM – Germany, Records from Soviet Commission to Investigate Nazi Crimes

This collection contains diverse records and directives of the German Army; orders, personnel lists, addresses, appeals, and civil and military administration correspondence about the occupied territories; anti-Soviet and antisemitic propaganda; and records related to the interrogation of German POWs by Soviet intelligence, pro-Soviet partisan activity, and the treatment of the Soviet POWs.

USHMM – Krakow, Poland, Applications for ID Cards for Jews during World War II (Part 1)

This collection contains records from Kraków, including questionnaires of Jews who applied for personal ID cards, household member lists, indexes, resettlement cards, and residence requests. We split this collection into parts for faster processing.  We’ll release additional parts as each previous section is completed. The questionnaires in Part One are sorted alphabetically from A-SILB.

Released to Search

Together with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Ancestry.com launched the World Memory Project a little over three months ago.  As a community you have responded remarkably to our plea for help in making these records more publicly accessible through indexing.  In the last 90 days the World Archives Project community has been joined by over 1900 additional individuals who have come specifically to index the USHMM records.  As a community you completed keying and arbitration of the first record collection in just 20 days.  We are proud to announce that this collection was released to search on Ancestry.com earlier this week.

USHMM: Munich, Germany, Displaced Jewish Children at the Ulm Children’s Home, 1945-1948

Following the surrender of the Nazis during World War II the Central Historical Commission of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the U.S. Zone, Munich (CHC) collected information about some of the child Holocaust survivors in the Displaced Persons camps.  This particular database is an extracted index of records for Jewish children brought to the Children’s Home in Ulm, Germany.  The children range in age from four to nineteen and were asked about their lives during the Nazi rule, the fate of their families, their journey to Ulm postwar, and their desired immigration location. Some of these children and their families fled to Soviet territory during World War II and were later deported by the Soviets to Middle Asia and Siberia.  Though there were only about 325 questionnaires indexed as part of this project, we captured each person listed, creating an index with information about more than 2700 individual family members.

Because of your efforts this index is now available online, for free, for anyone who wishes to search this collection.  Images of the original questionnaires, some with photos, can be obtained directly from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum using these ordering instructions.

IAJGS Conference

This coming week is the 31st annual International Conference on Jewish Genealogy.  This year it is being held in Washington D.C.  If you are planning on attending the conference be sure to attend the keynote address on Sunday evening.  Sara Bloomfield, director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, will be presenting a talk entitled, “Honoring the Victims:  It Takes A Village.”  I am certain she will discuss your efforts as part of the World Memory Project during her presentation.  I am also presenting at this conference.  Over the course of the week I will be teaching six classes for Ancestry.com on various ways to use our site and services to further your family history research.  If you are not attending the conference, but live in the D.C. area, I am also presenting a free class on beginning genealogy at the MLK Library this coming Monday at 1:00 pm (901 G Street NW, Room 307).  This class is sponsored by the International Association of Jewish Genealogy Societies and the Washingtoniana Division of the Martin Luther King Jr Library.

If you are in attendance at any of the events this next week, please don’t hesitate to find me and say hello.  I always love meeting our community members.

That’s all for this week.  Keep your eye on the blog next week for updates from the conference, information about keyer feedback, and a notice about two new California projects being published to key.

Until next time – Happy Keying!

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Reader Comments

I have participated on several of the USHHM projects and find them sad, but from a historical point of you is very interesting, as it give an insight of prison life and life in an occupied country. I find the project concerning forced labour especially moving, as people were shanted from pillar to post to hel the “German war effort” as their own boys were fighting at the front line. I do know from my mother that in Germany during the war every woman with one child or less had to work full-time. My mother did work with girls from Russia. They were only 19 years of age, rounded up and send to Germany to work. One of the girls, now an eldery woman contacted the firm in which she worked and a friendship developed.

That was a pretty fast turn around on the Ulm Children’s Home records.Good job from your staff.
I keyed 417,and arbitrated 96 of the records.
Elizabeth is right.It’s very sad,but you do learn so much about history.
As a matter of fact, I think the experience of working on the WPA projects is an extraordinary way to see aspects of history you couldn’t see in any book, or documentary.
It’s the intimate minutiae of people’s lives.
I don’t happen to have any Jewish heritage.But I do want to spend my time trying to help the descendants of the European Jews who
experienced WW2,and the Holocaust.

Please find some new records to key.

I don’t do well on the foreign language records, and most of the others on the list I have tried, but many are hand written records which I often struggle to understand (unlike the school records from London which were quite legible)

I understand that even hard to decipher records deserve to be archived, but you also should understand that we are volunteers, and when a project gets too frustrating, interest declines.

I haven’t done any archiving in at least a month because I can’t find any project that I want to work on

I have been trying to find help in keying the USHMM – Krakow, Poland forms with no luck. So I am trying here. I have part of a form I think the second page starting with 8. Bei unselststandig. I can’t find a reference to it on the example at all. What form do I put it on to? How do I join the front page with the back of the page when it runs on. Has somebody got any answers for me.

This is a (belated) reply to Judy Holman. I too found that I had pages starting with question 8, and they are the second page of the two first questionnaires listed in the document selection. However, that is little help. We really want to link them to the first page which sometimes comes up in the image set, or in another image set. I think one of the options should be Page 2 of the ER… or the Fra… questionnaires. What do you think?