The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and Footnote.com released the internet’s largest Interactive Holocaust Collection today. The collection can be viewed at www.footnote.com/holocaust. The collection has over one million Holocaust related records; including millions of names and 26,000 photos from the National Archives.

“We cannot afford to forget this period in our history” said Dr. Michael Kurtz, Assistant Archivist of the United States and author of America and the Return of Nazi Contraband: The Recovery of Europe’s Cultural Treasures. “Working with Footnote, these records will become more widely accessible, and will help people now and in the future learn more about the events and impact of the Holocaust.”

Included among the National Archives records available online at Footnote.com are:

• Concentration camp registers and documents from Dachau, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, and Flossenburg
• The “Ardelia Hall Collection” of records relating to the Nazi looting of Jewish possessions, including looted art
• Captured German records including deportation and death lists from concentration camps
• Nuernberg War Crimes Trial proceedings

The collection also includes nearly 600 interactive personal accounts of those who survived or perished in the Holocaust provided by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The project incorporates social networking tools that enable visitors to search for names and add photos, comments and stories, share their insights, and create pages to highlight their discoveries. There will be no charge to access and contribute to these personal pages.

Visit The Holocaust Collection for free in the month of October.

With a lot of help from the great folks at Family Tree Magazine, we are pleased to introduce the first ever Footnote Webinar.

This free 30-minute introduction to using Footnote covers:

• Records you’ll find on Footnote
• Searching Footnote
• Using the Footnote viewer
• Creating Footnote Pages

We do our best to make Footnote easy to use (and we’d appreciate any feedback that can help us get there), but there’s so much you can do on the site that a tutorial like this is a great way to get going.

Have a look at the webinar and the Getting the most out of Footnote page and let us know what you think in a comment here or through the Contact Footnote page.

Adding more than 1 million new records per month, Footnote.com will mark the month of October, designated Family History Month, with the addition of its 60 millionth image.

Since its launch in January 2007, Footnote.com has partnered with organizations including The National Archives and Gannett to digitize and index valued historical documents and photos and make them available online.

“Footnote.com is more than just a repository of documents and images,” said Russ Wilding, CEO of Footnote.com. “It’s a social gathering place where visitors can add photos, documents and other personal contributions, to create a more detailed and rich picture of our past.”

A favorite site of scholars, historians and genealogists Footnote.com has hundreds of rare and unique record collections including:

• Historical Newspapers
• Revolutionary War Documents
• Civil War Records and Photos
• The Interactive Vietnam Veterans Memorial
• WWII Collection

Included among the millions of records are a number of free collections like the Social Security Death Index (SSDI), which gives visitors the opportunity to create interactive experiences from a simple index. For each of the SSDI records Footnote.com has created a page that features a dynamic timeline, map, photo gallery, and section for others to contribute stories and insights about an individual.

Continue reading at http://bit.ly/Vk00b.

On September 21, 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed the first female associate Supreme Court Justice in Washington D.C., under the presidency of Ronald Reagan. She was a popular jurist and politician from Arizona. Read more about this monumental event at Footnote.com.

Today in History: Star-Spangled Banner penned as War of 1812 looms. Find out more about the Star-Spangled Banner and the author, Francis Scott Key, at Footnote.com.

Today in History; on September 10, 1813, nine U.S. vessals defeated and captured six British vessals in the Battle of Lake Erie, effectively taking control of the strategic Lake Erie. Find out why Lake Erie was so important and helped the US cause during the war at Footnote.com.