Millions of records to be digitized, put online
National Archives teams with genealogy company on project
The National Archives and the genealogy company Ancestry are teaming up to digitize and put online tens of millions of records from the Archives’ vast holdings.
The project, announced Thursday, will take place over five years. In the first phase, about 65.5 million records that had previously not been available online will appear on Ancestry’s website, the organizations said in a statement.
The newly available records will include military documents from World War II and the Korean War era, as well as immigration and naturalization reports, their statement said.
The data is expected to begin appearing in about two years, Pamela Wright, the Archives’ chief innovation officer, said Tuesday.
“Not everybody can drive to a National Archives facility,” Wright said. “It’s a geographic barrier for a lot of people, and making it digital, we like to say, democratizes access to the records.”
The process involves the conservation, preparation and copying of documents with scanning machines or digital cameras. Descriptive information is then added, and the documents will eventually be posted on the websites of the Archives, Ancestry and, in certain instances, Ancestry’s military website, Fold3.
Ancestry will cover much of the cost for labor, equipment and other expenses, Wright said. In some cases, the new data will be available only on Ancestry’s websites for three years “so that they can make some of that money back,” she said.
An Ancestry spokesperson said in an email the arrangement “allows Ancestry to provide value to its user base before the images become available to the public on [the Archives’] platform.”
Quinton Atkinson, senior director of global content at Ancestry, said his organization expects to spend about $10 million on the project.
“We are unlocking access to millions of documents and records that we can publish and make available more broadly than we ever have before,” he said Wednesday.
“This is the largest public-private archival partnership we’ve ever entered into,” he said.
Ancestry, which is based in Lehi, Utah, charges a subscription fee for use of its website, although it allows free access to records like those from the Freedman’s Bureau, the Chinese Exclusion Act period, and the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, Ancestry said.
The Archives website, although more cumbersome to use, is free. Wright said the website is being redesigned next year. “So we’ve got plans to make it better,” she said.