World Archives Project

You spent 3 years and persuaded 8577 people to key over 700,000 names and then only digitized the first page of the naturalization file?

In most cases, there are additional documents attached, including the Certificate of Arrival and the Declaration of Intention.

Also, when these additional pages were folded over to go to the next Naturalization Petition, they obscured most of the back of the Naturalization Petition. On the back are very important facts — especially whether the petition was actually granted. And, if not, the reason for the declination. Also, the back of the page will show the date of naturalization and any court ordered name change granted at the time of the naturalization order.

We keyed many declarations of intent, and saw many certificates of arrival, affidavits from witnesses, letters to the judge, back sides of petitions etc.

Not every image was indexed, and it appears that only the petitions have been posted thus far, but all of those additional documents most certainly WERE digitized, and keyers most certainly saw them.

(Given the problem the project had towards the end that resulted in many images getting “randomly” rearranged, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is only the first of several updates so that they can have *something* live while they figure out how to put the rest of the images back into their proper order.)

Thank you for acquiring the Naturalization certificates when possble.
I have been fortunate with ancestry.com, finding long lost cousins I never knew were on my family tree, finding second cousins that track our connection back to the 1850s in Austria/Poland…Thank you very much for all that you do to make our genealogy research easier.

Save Your Drum Roll, and all,
When you browse through the images you will now see many, many more images. There was an error in processing that occurred that has now been resolved. Enjoy!