Today, in conjunction with the National Archives and Records Administration, we announced the launch of the internet’s largest interactive World War II collection.

Some of the information in the collection has been on the site for a while, but this week we released two important additions, an interactive USS Arizona Memorial Wall and over 8 million Hero Pages created from U.S. Army enlistment records.

Some of the other titles in the collection include:

• Pearl Harbor Muster Rolls
• Missing Air Crew Reports
• U.S. Air Force Photos
• Submarine Patrol Reports
• Japanese Air Target Analysis
• Army JAG Case Files
• Navy JAG Case Files
• Naval Press Clippings
• Allied Military Conferences

You can read the full press release here, or begin exploring the collection here.

We are nearing Footnote’s first birthday. In the past 12 months, we have grown our collection from 4 million to nearly 24 million images.

One of our partners, The National Archives recently released an introduction on digitization at the National Archives. NARA states:

The strategic plan says that NARA will work to digitize selected records, including those most requested by researchers, and will put searchable descriptions of all our holdings online.

So, of all the collections held within the National Archives, which ones do you want? What time periods, historical events, or regional information interest you?

A good place to start researching what NARA has is through their ARC database.

The National Archives unveiled a handwritten note by Abraham Lincoln written on 7 July 1863 telling his generals to bring about “the litteral(sic) or substantial destruction of (Robert E.) Lee’s army” after the battle of Gettysburg. A week after Lincoln’s note, the Confederate army slipped across the Potomac River into Virginia, and the war continued for two more years. This document underscores one of the great missed opportunities for an early end to the Civil War.

In the bibliography of David McCullough’s bestselling book, “1776“, (see what else we’re reading) lies an interesting source: “Revolutionary Pension Records.”

Much of the power of McCullough’s writing comes from his ability to recount an event that happened more than 220 years ago and make seem like it happened yesterday.

The powerful drama unfolds in an unending series of unique, rich and personal details gathered from extensive research. Details like the ones you can now read for the first time online in the Revolutionary War Pension Records.

These newly digitized records contain historical information as well as information useful to those researching their family’s past. And each name contains a complete file of pension documentation – usually about 30 pages.

The pension records are even more valuable when you consider that most of the original service records and the earliest pension records of the Revolutionary War were destroyed in fires in 1800 and 1814.

So we’re proud this week to release the first portion (about 10 percent) of the applications. Soon, we’ll have more than 2 million documents containing 80,000 pension and Bounty-Land-Warrant applications.

To those who think this might sound like something interesting only to librarians or doctoral students, take a look inside.

When a person applied for a pension, he or she had to appear in court and describe – under oath – their service in the Revolutionary War. Widows had to provide information about their marriage.

Details that could be found in files include:

• Marriage certificates
• Property schedules
• Letters
• Pages from family Bibles
• Diaries
• Journals
• Witnesses’ affidavits
• Details of battles and campaigns
• Troop movement
• Civil events and conditions
• Family relationships

Each file offers an intensely human story of the brave individuals who sacrificed life and limb to make the ideals of the Declaration of Independence something more than words on parchment.

Take the typical case of Matthias Armbruster, “an old Soldier of the American Revolutionary Army.”

He enlisted in 1776 for one year in Germantown and then marched to Quebec.

He fought at the battles of Brandywine, Trenton, Princeton, Monmouth and the capture of Stoney Point.

He received bayonet wounds to the front of his head and his right arm from a “horseman whom he shot dead but afterwards.”

Check out the first-hand account of Mr. Armbruster, just 79,999 stories left to tell.

When complete, all of the images and indexes of this collection can be found on Footnote or will be freely viewable at the more than 4,500 LDS Church-run family history centers around the world.

Until recently, interest in Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) seemed to be waning. But lately they appear to making a comeback – especially in Canada where this year they have become more conspicuous. According to a study mentioned in the Toronto Star:

Aliens and spaceships are a bit passe these days, but 736 reported UFO sightings across Canada last year shows an “underlying, real phenomenon” going on, according to one of the country’s top UFO researchers.

Interest in UFOs seems to be growing worldwide from Northeast China to Chicago to France where, last month, the French government created a stir when its space agency published more than 1,600 reports online from its archives relating to UFOs and sightings of other unexplained phenomena.

If you’re interested in examining the evidence for UFOs, you can now access for free the Project Blue Book report documents compiled by the US Air Force from 1947 to 1969.

A little more than half of the 130,000 documents are available now but we’re hard at work to bring the complete NARA collection to the web for the first time.
In the meantime, we’ve enjoyed browsing the latest images. Here are two recent favorites to get you started:

If you’re looking for the full Footnote UFO experience, try out our enhanced viewer by clicking on any of these search results.

According to this story in The New York Times, not only is digitizing hard work – there’s a lot of it. The story summarizes well the challenges of making historic documents accessible online at the risk of being forgotten:

“For one thing, costs are prohibitive. Scanning alone on smaller items ranges from $6 to $9 for a 35-millimeter slide, to $7 to $11 a page for presidential papers, to $12 to $25 for poster-size pieces. (The cost of scanning an object can be a relatively minor part of the entire expense of digitizing and making an item accessible online.)”

For many there is a misunderstanding of just how little is currently available on the web:

“If researchers conclude that the only valuable records they need are those that are online they will be missing major parts of the story. And in some cases they will miss the story altogether.” – James J. Hastings, director of access programs at the National Archives.

We’re happy to see our efforts to digitize and give broader access to historical documents with NARA noted – and illustrated with a good-looking infographic:

Back on January 10, we announced our partnership with The National Archives. At the time, we already had over 4 million images primarily consisting of NARA documents that had never been on the Web before. Even more exciting is the vast amounts of new content that will be hitting Footnote throughout the year. We have just started work on three new titles. The first batch of images are available now.

Miscellaneous Papers of the Continental Congress (1774-1789) Consists mainly of papers relating to foreign, naval, and fiscal affairs; papers relating to specific states; and papers kept by the Office of the Secretary of Congress.
Sample Image: A cipher document written by John Jay – Click here

General Photographs of the Fine Arts Commission – Photos and illustrations of subjects including the Founding Fathers, cities, monuments, memorials, etc.
Sample Images: Early illustration of the Philadelphia Museum of Art – Click here

World War II Photos of Japanese Soldiers and of Allied Prisoners of War

New Titles Coming Soon to Footnote

• Domestic Letters of the Department of State from 1784-1906
• Revolutionary War Pensions
• Foreign Letters of the Continental Congress and Department of State from 1785-1790
• Ratified Indian Treaties
• Amistad Collection
• Presidential Photo Collections featuring Coolidge, FDR, Truman and Eisenhower

When I was a kid, watching the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, as the Ark is taken to an enormous warehouse and stored among piles of boxes of who knows what, I wanted to shout (with every other kid in the theater), “No, that’s really important!” Then I remember thinking, “If the ark is in that box, what’s in all the others?”

Last week when I visited the National Archives in Washington DC and Archives II in College Park, Maryland, that Raiders of the Lost Ark feeling came back.

As we walked through the stacks, our guides would stop, take down a box and pull out a document–a telegraph message from Abraham Lincoln–then put that back on the shelf and move on to another box, another document–George A. Custer’s acceptance letter from West Point–put that back, then go to another part of the building and take down the next box, the next document.

Of course I mention the big-name examples, but we also looked at service records from average soldiers, correspondence from various agencies, photographs, court records–you name it. Pretty soon I came to feel like I was in that warehouse from the Indiana Jones movie and each document held a story that someone really needed to get out of that box.

The other great thing about the visit was the people who work at the National Archives. It was like being back in that theater with all those other kids who wanted to shout, “Don’t just put that in there!” They know the collections so well and as far as I could tell, they genuinely love what they do. I was impressed at the lengths they go to maintain these records and help people find what they are looking for.

Anyway, it was a great trip. I’m excited about our partnership with the National Archives and I can’t wait to get some of those documents out of their boxes and onto the internet where their stories can be told.