Ancestry.com offering free access to its military ancestor research

Yesterday morning Lynda Loveland mentioned on the WRAL morning news that Ancestry.com is making some of its records available for free in celebration of memorial day. I wanted to give you a few more details.

In addition to celebrating Memorial Day, Ancestry.com is also celebrating its continuing relationship with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Ancestry.com has worked with NARA before, but now will have Ancestry.com technicians and scanning machines placed at NARA to increase the rate at which historical records are scanned. NARA collections to be digitized under this new agreement include INS Passenger and Crew Arrival and Departure Lists from 1897- 1958 and Death Notices of U.S. Citizens Abroad from 1835-1974.

But back to the FREE stuff. From now through May 31, Ancestry.com will make its military collection freely available at http://landing.ancestry.com/military/collections.aspx?html=main . This collection includes over 100 million names in 700 titles and databases. You can see the full list here. You'll notice that it spans from the Revolutionary War up to the 1970s. Particular data sets you might find interesting include World War I Draft Registration Cards, U.S. World War II Draft Registration Cards (there are also WWII enlistment records) and U.S. Veterans Gravesites, ca.1775-2006.

If you're like me, you might have found that your ancestors could get varied and creative when spelling their names. You can search for first, middle and last name (and have Ancestry.com search for approximate results) as well as search by year of birth and death, the conflict records you want to search, and keywords. (The keywords field is a good place to put a state of residence if your ancestor stayed in one place.)

Ancestry.com will return the records that match your search first, then show you those that get further afield. Searching for Sunshine Smith, for example, will find one result for Sunshine N C Smith, but will also find lots of different results for lots of other Smiths.

Actually seeing the records will require an Ancestry.com account, but those are free. Be sure to save the images of the records that you find, and make the most of your free access!